Pianello del Lario

The Museo della Barca Lariana was inaugurated in 1982 in the former Erba silk mill, a nineteenth-century building on the lakeshore. It grew from the collection of GianAlberto Zanoletti, Marquis of Rozzano, who as a boy spent time with the lake's old fishermen and boatwrights and in 1977 bought the mill to house his wooden boats; today the collection fills halls, stores and open-air spaces, with almost two hundred rowing boats and gondolas, hundreds of motorboats and engines and more than three thousand photographs.

In front of the museum runs the Breva e Tivan lakeside promenade: it starts from the Crotti locality, named after the old crotti mentioned in several historical texts, and goes as far as Musso. To the south the shore continues almost level, past the pier and the church of San Martino, to the campsites and beaches and on to Cremia. A few boats on the Como–Colico line call at the pier.

The church of San Martino, at Calozzo, a few metres from the lakefront and the pier, was the church of the medieval court; it became a parish in 1472 and was reworked several times, above all in the sixteenth century, as the date 1534 on the lintel of the portal records. Inside are a sixteenth-century triptych of the Madonna enthroned between Saint Anthony Abbot and Saint Bernard, the frescoes of Isidoro Bianchi of Campione, a marble ciborium of 1536 and the processional cross of 1489 by the Gravedona goldsmith Francesco Ser Gregori; the bronze door tells the life of the Blessed Sister Chiara Bosatta, born at Pianello.

From 1881 to 1890 Pianello's parish priest was Don Luigi Guanella, the saint who founded homes for the elderly and for abandoned children in Italy and around the world: he began his work here, first with the hospice at Camlago, then with a larger house at Calozzo, the Casa Sacro Cuore, which is still at work today. Higher up, at Coslia, the church of the Madonna della Neve was rebuilt and enlarged in the early eighteenth century, on the site of an older chapel, by people of the Tre Terre who had emigrated to the Genoa area and the Veneto; from its forecourt you see much of the upper lake.

By tradition, in 724 the Lombard king Liutprand gave the abbey of San Carpoforo in Como the lands of Pianello along with others. In 1389 the monastery's rights came to an end, and Pianello came under the Malacrida, lords of Musso. The village won its independence from Musso, as a comune and as a parish, on 12 June 1472: the date is engraved on the bronze altar that Gianluigi Giudici made for San Martino in 1972.

In 1644 Pianello belonged to the Squadra di Rezzonico, a district of the Contado of Como. In 1751 it had 470 inhabitants; each year a general assembly elected the syndics and the chancellor, and the comune's papers were kept in the parish church, in a cupboard with three keys. From 1807 to 1816 the comune also took in Cremia and Musso; in 1863 it took the name Pianello del Lario. At the end of the nineteenth century many people left for seasonal work beyond the Alps or emigrated to the Americas.

The hamlet of Sant'Anna, called Pianello Grande until the mid-nineteenth century, has at its centre the little church of the saint. It was built between 1636 and 1652 with bequests from people of Pianello who had emigrated to Genoa and Milan; the altarpiece of the Virgin, the Child and Saint Anne dates from 1661, the portico from 1726. The solemn feast is on 26 July.

Up on the mountain, at Nassina, the oratory of San Bernardino looks out over the upper lake. A chapel already stood here before 1582; the oratory had been rebuilt by 1766 and was enlarged in the second half of the twentieth century by the people of the monti. For centuries, on 20 May, the saint's feast day, people climbed up in procession from the parish church.

Dina Bosatta was born at Pianello on 27 May 1858, the daughter of Alessandro, a small silk producer. In 1878 she and her sister Marcellina joined the Pia Unione delle Figlie di Santa Maria, founded by the parish priest Carlo Coppini for the hospice at Camlago, opened in 1873. Under Don Guanella the union became a congregation, and Dina took the name Sister Chiara. She died at Pianello on 20 April 1887 and was beatified in 1991.

From the shore beside San Martino, one evening in April 1886, two sisters and a few orphan girls set off by boat for Como, where Don Guanella's Casa della Divina Provvidenza began that year. At Calozzo the house where the Bosatta sisters grew up, built into the Casa Sacro Cuore, keeps belongings of the two sisters and of Don Guanella. The neo-Gothic church of the Sacro Cuore, which Don Guanella wanted for the house, was inaugurated in 1909. Pianello is a stage on the “Sui passi di don Luigi Guanella” pilgrim route.