San Siro

Rezzonico, “Rescionegh” in dialect, is an old fishing village gathered on the slopes of a promontory, below its castle, with sunny rocks, small natural beaches and old porticoes on the water. Three defensive gates and two tower houses survive, probably of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and on the lake stand two seventeenth-century palazzi with the Della Torre arms over the door. The castle, of the fourteenth century, is private property. There are several theories about the name: the Raeti who ruled the upper lake, an Etruscan leader called Rhaeto, or the “risciulada”, the local cobbled paving.

South of the village, on the rise above the road tunnel, stand the square tower and walls of the Castellaccio, which perhaps connected with the fortress at Santa Maria and with Rezzonico's walls; legend ties it to a Spanish petty lord known as il Ficano, and Antonio de Ficanis was murdered there in 1612. Towards Cremia an easy road, on an ancient Roman line, runs between fields and chestnut woods.

At Santa Maria, on the shore, the church of Santa Maria Assunta was built between 1464 and 1474 for the Dominicans. Beside it rises a large quadrangle of walls, up to six metres high and very thick, unmatched in size anywhere in the province of Como: it may be what remains of a late Roman fortress that watched the traffic on the Regina road and the lake, and excavations have found many rooms and passages inside it. It is now an archaeological site.

Further south, at Acquaseria, where the town hall is, the little church of Sant'Abbondio stands at the edge of the old village, on the line of the ancient Via Regina: very probably it offered travellers shelter and a place to give thanks for coming safely past the dangerous path of the Sasso Rancio. Restored and enriched in the seventeenth century, in 1712 it was granted a privilege of indulgences that drew pilgrims from as far as Torno, Garzeno and Musso. On the Gaeta point, at Acquaseria, stands Villa La Gaeta, the Coppedè brothers' eclectic castle, finished in 1921.

Como's statutes of 1335 list three comuni, San Siro, Sant'Abbondio and the borgo of Rezzonico, all in the pieve of Menaggio, and each had to maintain a stretch of the Via Regina. In 1644 the three comuni, with Plesio, Nobiallo, Pianello and Breglia, formed the Squadra di Rezzonico, a district of the Contado of Como. In 1751 San Siro had 390 inhabitants and no feudal lord, and it elected two syndics, one for the upper and one for the lower part of the comune.

In 1640 a branch of the Rezzonico family moved to Venice, and in 1687 it joined the Venetian patriciate. From this branch came Carlo Rezzonico, born in Venice in 1693 and elected pope in 1758 as Clement XIII. From 1807 to 1816 the three comuni were united under San Siro. On 21 June 1928 they were joined in the new comune of Santa Maria Rezzonico, from which Sant'Abbondio broke away on 31 January 1957.

At Acquaseria the church of Santi Abbondio e Felice was built between 1930 and 1937 and took over from the little church of Sant'Abbondio as the parish church. At Mastena the Della Torre family's church of San Giovanni Battista was built from 1676 and is privately owned. At Roncate the church of Santi Rocco e Sebastiano, recorded at the end of the sixteenth century, was enlarged in 1717.

Up the mountain, at Carcente, another church of Santi Rocco e Sebastiano was probably built after the plague of 1425 and enlarged in the seventeenth century. Santa Croce at Treccione and Santa Lucia at Gallio already stood by the end of the sixteenth century; the Immacolata Concezione at Lucena had just been restored in 1756 and was renewed in 1876. At Santa Maria the former oratory of the Confratelli was probably built in the second half of the eighteenth century by the confraternity of the Holy Rosary.

The old Via Regina crosses the whole comune and is protected as an archaeological site. From Nobiallo, in Menaggio, the mule track climbs over the Sasso Rancio, the crag above the lake, and drops through the woods to Acquaseria. It then continues, cobbled in places, through Molvedo and Mastena, passes above Santa Maria between vegetable gardens and stone walls, and reaches Rezzonico beside the remains of the Castellaccio.

On the shore, a short footpath leads to the beach known as San Siro: when the lake is very low, the foundations of the seventeenth-century chapel of San Siro appear there. Higher up runs the Via dei Monti Lariani, part of the Sentiero Italia. Beyond the Monti di Gallio a dirt road climbs to the pastures of the Alpe Rescanscia, at 1413 metres, on the flank of the Bregagno.