Moltrasio

The Scala Santa is the straight stairway, stone from top to bottom, that joins Via Besana to the Via Regina by the lake. It has two surfaces: stones set on edge in a smooth run, for the sledges that brought stone, timber and goods down to the landing, and a strip a third as wide in low steps, so that people climbing on foot were not run down. The same stairway leads up to Sant'Agata, turning left towards the “Pos Palaz”.

Besides stone, the village's other resource is water. The Pizzallo runs down the Valle dei Molini under the Pasètt bridge, probably the oldest in the valley, on the line of the old Via Regina between Sant'Agata and Santa Marta at Carate Urio. Just above Piazza Umberto I is the wash house of the early twentieth century, used until the 1980s, and the village has thirty drinking fountains, the first of them from the late nineteenth century, when the aqueduct arrived.

Moltrasio's villas stand at the water's edge and are private property. Villa Passalacqua grew from a core built by the Odescalchi; the Lucini Passalacqua had it redesigned by Felice Soave, with stairways, fountains and terraced gardens held up by underground galleries. Villa Le Rose was where Winston Churchill stayed; Villa Salterio Erker was the home of Vincenzo Bellini.

The churches belong to different periods. The parish church of Santi Martino e Agata, in the Borgo, is documented in 1207. Since 1721 it has kept a relic of the Holy Thorn and, on a side altar, a polyptych by Alvise de Donati of 1507 with the Nativity at its centre; its facade of local stone dates from 1935, when the church and the square were enlarged. The Romanesque church of Sant'Agata served as a pest house during the seventeenth-century plague: the 2006 restoration uncovered sixteenth-century frescoes that had lain for centuries under the lime spread against the contagion. On the square in front of the landing stage, the oratory of San Rocco has a Baroque doorway and, over the altar, a badly damaged fresco by Giovanni Paolo Recchi of the Virgin between Saints Roch and Sebastian.

The oldest traces of Moltrasio are a copper axe from the third millennium BC and a few Roman coins. A notarial deed of 1058 shows that the village was already a commune with its own consuls. In 1292 Como's statutes gave it the title of borgo, and those of 1335 made it responsible for maintaining the Via Regina as far as the village bridge. Moltrasio belonged to the pieve, the old church district, of Zezio, and in 1405 it was granted the citizenship of Como.

In 1522 Moltrasio was sacked by the men of Torno, its rival on the opposite shore. In 1652 it was one of the “Cinque terre unite alla città di Como”, the five lands joined to the city of Como, with 61 households. By the mid-eighteenth century it answered to no feudal lord, having bought itself free, and had 491 inhabitants. In 1807 a Napoleonic decree joined the comune of Urio to it; Urio became independent again with the Restoration.

An easy path links Moltrasio to Carate Urio and Laglio along old mule tracks and stairways. From the pier you climb the Scala Santa and follow the Pizzallo up to Tosnacco, the highest hamlet, at 312 metres, then carry on almost on the level towards Urio and Carate. Laglio is about an hour and a half away, with 120 metres of ascent.

Two paths climb from Moltrasio to the Colma del Bugone, at 1,119 metres, on the Via dei Monti Lariani, the long-distance trail that starts at Cernobbio. One of them is the Culman, a very steep path that was a smugglers' route: the “spalloni” carried goods on their backs along it from Switzerland down to the lake. At the Colma grows an old beech whose trunk measures more than six and a half metres round, a few minutes' walk from the Monte Bisbino area, 1,325 metres high.

Wine was kept in the crotti, cellars built of the village stone. Laurel berries were gathered too: in the land survey of 1721–1722 Moltrasio declared twenty-five staia of them a year, almost five hundred litres. Boiling the berries gave a medicinal oil.

The patronal feast of San Martino falls on 11 November, and in December comes the Christmas torchlight walk “dai monti al lago”, from the mountains to the lake. Every summer, at the end of July, the Canottieri Moltrasio rowing club holds a swim across the lake: about a thousand metres, from Torno to the Moltrasio shore.