Menaggio

Menaggio lies on the western shore, in the middle of the lake, where the Sanagra stream flows into the Lario. Here the road up the Val Menaggio towards Porlezza and Lake Lugano leaves the lakeside road. The centre opens onto Piazza Garibaldi, right on the water, and the tree-lined promenade runs north to the lido, a Rationalist building of 1934.

The ferry reaches Bellagio and Varenna in a quarter of an hour; the bus gets to Como in an hour and to Lugano in a little more. The lido is a five-minute walk from the centre. The town has a weekly market and everyday shops, and in the hills above Menaggio is a golf club founded in 1907.

Menaggio stands on the Via Regina, the road of Roman origin that ran up the western shore towards the Alpine passes. In the Middle Ages it was the head of a pieve, a rural parish district, and had a castle controlling the fork towards Lake Lugano. In 1523 troops from the Grisons, who had already conquered the Valtellina, set the town on fire and destroyed the castle.

In 1805 Menaggio became the seat of a sub-prefecture, and in 1859 it was the centre of the uprising against the Austrians in the Como area. The nineteenth century brought hotels on the lakefront and villas at Loveno, and from 1884 to 1939 a railway linked Menaggio with Porlezza, on Lake Lugano. In the twentieth century the Mantero family had a silk factory at Burgatto, on the Sanagra; on the promenade, Francesco Somaini's monument to the weaver recalls the work in silk. In April 1945 Mussolini, on the run, stopped in Menaggio before partisans captured him at Dongo.

Set into the outer walls of the oratory of Santa Marta, on Via Calvi, are a Roman plaque found in the lake and a fifteenth-century keystone carved with the castle, the image the town uses as its coat of arms. Close by, the nave and aisles of the parish church of Santo Stefano were frescoed in 1899 by the painter Tagliaferri. At the head of the left aisle is the copy of Bernardino Luini's Madonna of Menaggio, whose original is in the Louvre. Santo Stefano is the town's patron saint, and his feast is on 26 December.

Behind the church you climb to the Castello, the medieval quarter that still keeps stretches of the fortress walls. On the way up, on Via Castellino da Castello, stands the birthplace of the Jesuit Gabriele Malagrida, put to death in Lisbon in 1761. On the ruins of the fortress rises the church of San Carlo, built in 1614 by Cinzio Calvi as a tomb for himself and his wife.

Loveno, on the hill above the centre, is the hamlet where many villas were built in the nineteenth century. In 1829 Heinrich Mylius, a merchant born in Frankfurt, bought an estate here for the wedding of his son Julius. The last heir, Ignazio Vigoni, left it to the Federal Republic of Germany. Since 1986 Villa Vigoni has been the German-Italian Centre for European Dialogue, and it is visited with a guide. The centre also includes Villa Garovaglio Ricci, converted from an eighteenth-century silk mill.

Just north of the centre, along the Regina, Nobiallo is an old fishing village whose streets and steps run down to the lake, with a leaning medieval bell tower. Higher up, among the woods, the sanctuary of the Madonna della Pace, consecrated in 1660, keeps above its altar the relief of the Miracle, carved by Matteo Destopanis in 1484.

Monte Grona, 1,736 metres high, rises above Menaggio. From Breglia, at 749 metres, a waymarked path climbs in about an hour and three quarters to the Rifugio Menaggio, at about 1,400 metres. From the hut the summit is another hour and twenty minutes, with a few protected sections. From the top you see the lakes of Como, Lugano and Piano and, on clear days, the Alps.

From the hamlet of Croce, about forty minutes' walk takes you up to the Crocetta, at an elevation of about 500 metres, through the 1915 trenches of the Cadorna Line, with the centre of the lake before you. Northwards the Antica Strada Regina leads to Rezzonico in about three hours, by way of Nobiallo and the Sasso Rancio. Westwards, in the Val Menaggio, the cycle and foot path on the old railway crosses the Lago di Piano nature reserve; southwards, at Griante, the Greenway begins.