Malgrate

Malgrate stands on the shore opposite Lecco, near the point where the Adda flows out of the lake. From the waterfront you can see the town, the bell tower of San Nicolò and, behind them, the Resegone and San Martino.

The lakefront is level, continuous and free of traffic, and takes twenty minutes to walk. It is a linear park designed by the landscape architect Stefano Santambrogio and opened in 2013. On the shore is the little harbour, once the centre of village life, where fishermen, boatmen and washerwomen met. Behind the village rises Monte Barro.

Before the Azzone Visconti bridge was built, between 1336 and 1338, Malgrate's harbour linked the two shores. In 1456 the village appears among the communes of the Monte di Brianza, in the pieve of Garlate. In 1538 it was given in fief, together with the pievi of Garlate and Oggiono, to Giovanni Agostino d'Adda. By 1751 it had bought its freedom and no longer had a feudal lord.

The first country villas were built in the eighteenth century. The Agudio family had a palace on the lakefront, where the Milanese poet Domenico Balestrieri stayed several times; a view of the palace was printed in 1744 in one of his books of verse in Milanese. In the nineteenth century the old Bovara residence became the Bovara Reina silk mill.

The Kennedy bridge, designed by Arturo Danusso and built between 1952 and 1955, links Malgrate with Lecco. On foot the city centre is twenty-five minutes away and the station half an hour.

In the centre stands the parish church of San Leonardo. It was rebuilt in the sixteenth century, and between 1812 and 1815 the architect Giuseppe Bovara renewed it and gave it its Neoclassical front with four half-columns. In 1607 Archbishop Federico Borromeo made Malgrate a parish of its own, separating it from San Nicolò in Lecco. The patron saint is Saint Leonard, whose feast falls on 6 November. Bovara also designed Palazzo Agudio, built between 1816 and 1820, which houses the town hall.

The church of San Carlo was built in the second half of the seventeenth century by the Recalcati family, beside their palace. The parish of San Carlo was created in 1977 and made a new church out of the palace's old stables, with stained-glass windows by Trento Longaretti from 1978. The church of Sant'Antonio Abate dates from the fifteenth century and keeps a fresco fragment of the Crucifixion from the same century.

Two inventors were born in Malgrate. The engineer Tommaso Agudio, who was born in 1827 and died in Turin in 1893, devised a traction system for railways on steep gradients, the locomotore-funicolare. In 1883 he obtained the concession for the line between Sassi and Superga, on the hill of Turin. The line opened on 27 April 1884 and ran on his system.

Pietro Vassena, who was born in 1897 and died in Lecco in 1967, designed outboard motors and motorcycles, and built the C3 bathyscaphe. On 12 March 1948, off Argegno, he took the C3 down to 412 metres in Lake Como.

Monte Barro, 922 metres high, has been a regional park since 1983. From the ridge you see the Lecco branch, Lake Garlate and Lake Annone together. Path 306 starts in Malgrate, passes Pian Sciresa, a level meadow on the eastern slope, and reaches the archaeological park of the Piani di Barra in about an hour. Path 304 starts at the Azzone Visconti bridge, also passes Pian Sciresa and reaches the summit in under two hours. The stretch between the Sasso della Vecchia and the Pràa della Corna is not recommended for the descent.

At the Piani di Barra, excavations have uncovered the remains of a settlement of the Goths from the fifth and sixth centuries. A little higher up, at the Eremo, the archaeological museum shows the objects found in the digs.