Musso

The Sasso di Musso is the pale, squared headland that separates the village from Dongo. It is a white marble quarry worked for centuries, which has cut the rock back into the regular shape you see from the road. From 1452 Musso marble became the main material of Como Cathedral, and the façade, built between 1457 and 1486, is made of this stone. In the village the same marble forms the columns of the church of San Biagio.

The main road passes through the Sasso in a tunnel. From the boat between Menaggio and Gravedona the whole quarry face can be seen at once. There are no visitor facilities at the quarry; the story of the quarries is told in the village's Museo Civico Storico.

A castle stood on the Sasso, built in the fourteenth century by the Malacrida family for the Visconti. In 1523 Gian Giacomo Medici, known as the Medeghino, brother of the future Pope Pius IV, seized it and installed himself there as castellan in the name of the Duke of Milan, Francesco II Sforza. The Medeghino turned the castle into a fortress and armed a fleet of his own, with which he controlled traffic on the upper lake. For some years he acted as an independent lord between Milan and the Grisons, against whom he fought the two Musso wars. In 1532, after the second war, fought against the duke and the Swiss as well, he came to terms with the duke: he gave up Musso in exchange for the marquisate of Marignano, and the fortress was dismantled.

Only a few walls of the fortress remain. On the ground it occupied stand the church of Sant'Eufemia, which was part of the fortress and was rebuilt around 1622, and the Giardino del Merlo, the botanical garden laid out between 1858 and 1883 by the engineer Giovanni Manzi.

Musso appears in the statutes of Como in 1335 as the commune responsible for maintaining a stretch of the Via Regina in the pieve of Dongo. In 1472 Pianello del Lario separated from Musso. The Malacrida held the fief for most of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and in 1617 they ceded it to the Bossi family. Besides quarrying, people in Musso reared silkworms, and many from the upper lake emigrated to the Americas and elsewhere in Europe.

The Museo Civico Storico, opened in 2017, tells these stories along with those of the quarries and the castle. On 27 April 1945 the German column in which Mussolini was travelling was stopped at a partisan checkpoint just beyond the village of Musso. The lorries were then searched at Dongo, where Mussolini was recognised and arrested.

San Biagio, in the centre of the village, began in the twelfth century as the church of Saints Nazarius and Celsus and became the parish church under its present name in 1387. The building, in the Lombard Romanesque style, bears the date 1507 on the lintel of the central portal. Its nave and two aisles are separated by columns of white Musso marble, and the lunettes above the portals are painted with scenes from the saint's life. The rose window was walled up in 1812, when a Serassi organ was installed against the inside of the façade. The bell tower by the road dates from 1730.

The oldest works inside are a Saint Anthony Abbot and a Saint Defendens by the local painter Battista Malacrida, the first dated 1502. San Biagio is the village's patron saint, celebrated on 3 February. Above Musso stand two small churches that can be reached only by footpath: Sant'Eufemia on the Sasso and, higher up, San Bernardo on the Via dei Monti Lariani.