Nesso

The orrido is the narrow, deep gorge that cuts the village in two. Here the Tuf and Nosée streams, coming down from the valleys of the same names, meet and plunge towards the lake: from the top of the waterfall to the shore the drop is about 200 metres. At the foot of the gorge the water passes under the Ponte della Civera, a single-arched stone bridge, and enters the lake beside a small harbour. The waterfall carries more water in spring.

From the centre of the village a steep stairway of about three hundred steps leads down to the bridge between the houses. There is no handrail along the whole way and the steps are slippery after rain: wear closed shoes. The stairway is not suitable for pushchairs. The Lariana road, narrow and full of bends, runs above the village. From Piazza Castello, on the road, the gorge can also be seen from above. The boat lands a few steps from the bridge.

Nesso is first named in 951, when Berengar II, King of Italy, granted the estates of the court of Nesso to the monastery of Santa Maria del Senatore in Pavia. In the Middle Ages the village was the head of a pieve, a district of churches and villages on both shores of the Como branch. By 1184 its church was already led by an archpriest.

In the Ten Years' War between Como and Milan (1118–1127) Nesso sided with Milan, and the people of Como destroyed its fortification. In 1449 they built a new castle here, in support of the Ambrosian Republic. It was destroyed in 1532, during the war against the Medeghino. Giambattista Bazzoni set his historical novel Falco della Rupe o la guerra di Musso, published in 1829, in these places.

In 1497 Ludovico il Moro gave Nesso, with its whole pieve, to Lucrezia Crivelli. From 1647 to 1787 the fief belonged to the Casnedi family.

For centuries the waterfall powered the village. Mills, paper mills, spinning mills and olive-oil presses worked along the gorge, all driven by the water, and Nesso became a village of workshops. In the Middle Ages the mills on the streams were used to make woollen cloth, which was exported. A document of 1468 records the sale of a house with two mills near the castle.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Lake Como drew travellers from abroad, many artists portrayed the gorge. Among their views is an aquatint by Federico and Carolina Lose.

Near the lake, in the lower part of the village, stands the church of Santi Pietro e Paolo, the old church of the pieve, which the village calls the duomo. Tradition holds that Bishop Rainaldo of Como founded it in the eleventh century and that Pope Urban II consecrated it in 1095. The bell tower dates from 1538. From 1632 the church was rebuilt in Baroque style, and the chapel of Saint Joseph has frescoes attributed to Carlo Innocenzo Carloni.

In the Vico hamlet, on the road to Zelbio, the Romanesque church of Santa Maria, already recorded in 1184, keeps paintings made between 1287 and 1312 and the polyptych of the Assumption, painted by Bartolomeo de Benzi in 1500. Above the gorge, in the Castello hamlet, the great wall of the 1449 castle survives, with merlons added in the nineteenth century. The castle is private and can only be seen from outside. Beside it stands the church of San Lorenzo, which in its present form dates from the sixteenth century.

A little further south lies Careno, a comune of its own until 1928, when it was joined to Nesso. Its old core has not a single street for cars: flights of steps lead down to the Romanesque church of San Martino, almost at water level, already recorded in 1184. It was the parish church until the mid-seventeenth century, when the village built the church of Santa Maria Assunta, founded in 1665 and consecrated in 1671. Nesso and Careno fit into the same day.

The Strada Regia runs through Nesso: the paved mule track that climbs the eastern shore of the Como branch from Brunate to Bellagio. Southwards it leads to Pognana, northwards to Lezzeno. Paths of the Lariano Triangle also climb from the village and reach high ground in a couple of hours. At Nosée, on the road to Tronno, the stream of the gorge gathers in a pool beneath a two-arched stone bridge.