Pognana Lario

Among the houses of Moltrasio stone at Pognana stands the eighteenth-century parish church of the Holy Trinity. Nearby is the so-called Castello, an eighteenth-century house that served as a wartime refuge, town hall, inn and school before becoming a home. At Rovasco, between the old main road and the slopes of the Preaola, stands the church of San Miro, of the twelfth or thirteenth century: it grew from a small Lombard oratory and was enlarged in the fifteenth century. Its left flank carries proto-Romanesque frescoes of a friar saint and a Saint Christopher between two angels; inside are a Romanesque arch and an altarpiece attributed to Carlo Innocenzo Carloni.

Canzaga, towards Faggeto, has houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is linked to the centre of Pognana by a path lined with the chapels of the Way of the Cross. Here stands the church of San Rocco, once Pognana's parish church. It dates from the twelfth or thirteenth century and was first dedicated to the Trinity. Its vault is covered by a cycle of frescoes from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries by the Torno painter Bartolomeo de Benzi: God, the symbols of the Evangelists, the four Doctors of the Church and eight prophets. The frescoes were restored in 1987. The church square looks out over the lake.

In 1335 Quarzano, now a hamlet on the border with Nesso, was still a comune of its own. Under the Duchy of Milan Pognana belonged to the pieve of Nesso, and in 1467 the church at Canzaga, today San Rocco, became the village's parish church.

The Casnedi fief ended in 1787, when the last male heir of the family died and the fief returned to the Royal Chamber of the Duchy of Milan. In 1807 a decree of Napoleon joined Lemna and Palanzo to Pognana, and the population rose from about four hundred to almost a thousand; with the Restoration the two villages became comuni of their own again.

Günzburg, in Bavaria, was one of the places where emigrants from Pognana went. There the Rebay family set up a trading business, and part of its earnings went into building and decorating the new church of the Holy Trinity. Work began around 1732 and ended in 1744. In 1747 the church became the parish church, and the old church at Canzaga was dedicated to San Rocco.

Inside are seventeenth-century liturgical furnishings and a canvas of Saint Joseph and the Child, painted in 1766 by the German painter Januarius Zick. The altarpiece of the Holy Trinity is by the Ticino painter Giovanni Battista Innocenzo Colomba, who painted it between 1784 and 1796, probably for the Rebay family. The façade was restored in 1983.

On the border with Nesso, at Quarzano, the Cappella di Nera is dedicated to the Madonna of the Rosary and keeps a painting of the Madonna and Child among angels, with two Franciscan saints at her feet. Around the village, above all at Pognana and Rovasco, stand the sculptures in Pietra Dorata made in 1986 for an international competition.

Higher up, on the mule track to the Colma della Guardia, the “Buco di Premen” is a cleft in the rock that opens through to the Valassina. On the shore the boat calls at the Pognana pier, and the Strada Regia, the old mule track between Brunate and Bellagio, passes this way too.

On 16 August Pognana celebrates its patron saint, San Rocco. Since 1974 the feast has come with a gnocchi festival: in the square by the church at Canzaga, Pro Loco volunteers make gnocchi by hand and serve them at lunch and dinner.

The footpath to Palanzo, a hamlet of Faggeto Lario, starts from the San Rocco square. Palanzo has the church of Sant'Ambrogio, the remains of its castle and the wine press of 1572; outside the village, a quarter of an hour's walk away, the church of the Madonna del Soldo looks out over the lake.