Mandello del Lario

Carlo Guzzi and Giorgio Parodi founded Moto Guzzi in 1921; they had met in military aviation during the First World War. The eagle in the badge honours their friend Giovanni Ravelli, a pilot killed in a flying accident in 1919. Since then motorcycles have been built without interruption in the factory on Via Parodi, in the middle of town. In 1950 Guzzi built the first wind tunnel for motorcycles here.

The museum is inside the works. Rebuilt together with the factory, it reopened in September 2026 in a new building with views of the assembly lines. It shows more than 160 motorcycles, from the 1919 G.P., the first built by Carlo Guzzi, to the 1921 Normale and the racing machines, among them the 1955 Otto Cilindri. Every September Mandello hosts the Motoraduno Internazionale Città della Moto Guzzi, a rally that brings riders from Italy and abroad.

The lakeside village has a rectangular plan like that of a Roman camp. A Benedictine monastery already existed here in 833, and the counts of Mandello took their surname from the place. In the Ten Years' War between Como and Milan, Mandello sided with Como, and in 1126 troops from Lecco and Milan sacked it. In 1160 it became a self-governing commune. Rubaconte da Mandello, podestà of Florence in 1237, had the Rubaconte bridge built over the Arno there; Dante mentions it in the Purgatorio, and the Ponte alle Grazie stands in its place.

In 1480 Mandello joined Bellano and Varenna in the Contado della Riviera. In 1495 Ludovico il Moro granted the fief to Gaspare di San Severino. In 1532, between Mandello and Onno, Sforza troops ambushed the Medeghino, lord of Musso, and his brother Gabriele was killed. From 1533 to 1788 the fief belonged to the Sfondrati. The coast road opened in 1832, and the railway arrived in 1892.

In the Middle Ages the lakeside area was split between the castrum, the fortified enclosure where people took refuge when attacked, and the borgo, divided into quarters and closed by walls and gates. A moat fed by the lake ran round the walls; it was filled in 1775, and Via del Fosso follows its line. What survives is the Torre Pretoria and the Romanesque bell tower of San Lorenzo, from the twelfth century, once one of the towers of the castrum.

San Lorenzo was rebuilt in the seventeenth century and is Baroque inside, with a Serassi organ of 1764; next to it is the Museo d'Arte Sacra. The sanctuary of the Beata Vergine del Fiume grew out of a seventeenth-century miracle linked to a flood of the Meria. Above the village, San Giorgio keeps a Last Judgement frescoed in the fifteenth century. The feast of the patron saint, Saint Lawrence, is on 10 August, and in mid-June the Sagra della Tradizione Lariana brings costume parades to the old centre.

For centuries the Meria torrent and the roggia, a man-made channel, gave the village its work. In 1629 Roberto Rusca described the mill wheels, the hammers beating iron and copper and the machines for fulling woollen cloth: the names of the Molina quarter and of the Fula come from those trades. Around the middle of the nineteenth century Mandello had the Badoni ironworks and a factory making spindles for twisting yarn, opened in 1850; a velvet mill came later.

With Moto Guzzi, from 1921, the village became an industrial centre, and more industries were founded after the Second World War. The factory's workers' club had sports teams and groups of mountaineers. At the 1948 London Olympics the coxless four of the Canottieri Moto Guzzi rowing club won the gold medal. Viale Medaglie Olimpiche Mandellesi is named after the town's Olympic medallists.

Behind Mandello rise the two Grigne: the southern one, or Grignetta, at about 2,180 metres, and the northern one, or Grignone, at 2,410. Their walls can be seen from the lakefront and are historic ground for Lombard mountaineering. The women climbers of the Guzzi family, pioneers of women's climbing, also opened new routes here.

From Rongio a path climbs the Val Meria to the Rifugio Elisa, at 1,515 metres, in about three hours. A shorter climb leads from the station to the church of San Giorgio and the hamlet of Maggiana, with its tower, along the Sentiero del Viandante, which continues along the slope above the town towards Lierna and Varenna. The Piani Resinelli, at the foot of the Grignetta, lie partly within the municipality of Mandello; by car you reach them by following the signs for the Valsassina.