Sorico

Sorico is younger than its neighbours: it was founded in 1432, after the Mera had destroyed Olonio, down on the Pian di Spagna, one time too many. The parish church of Santo Stefano was built in 1443 to replace Olonio's and remade at the start of the eighteenth century by the Giulini family; it faces Piazza Cesare Battisti, where the town hall stands and where the walk up to San Miro begins.

For almost three centuries, from the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth, the border between the Grisons and the Duchy of Milan ran through here. What remains of it, beside the San Miro stream, is a ruined little tower of the old lookouts. The paved lane that runs from the village towards the mouth of the Mera, past the old wash house, is also a cycle path: it leads to where the river enters the lake, with the Legnone opposite and an avenue of beeches that turns orange-red in autumn.

In 1455 a bull of Pope Callixtus III confirmed the transfer of the titles of parish, archpriestship and pieve from Olonio to Santo Stefano. In 1701 the Counts Giulini obtained the patronage of the parish church, and in the first decades of the eighteenth century they built their palace at Sorico. On the night of 1 September 1755 a flood of the Sorico stream partly buried it under debris. In 1783 the stream was diverted into its present bed; the palace survives as a ruin.

During the First World War Sorico became a military post once more: at Brentalone, on the Berlinghera, observation posts and powder magazines were cut into the rock, reached by the military road that climbs from Albonico. At the end of the Second World War the same mountain was the base of the “Puecher” detachment of the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade, the partisan brigade that arrested Mussolini at Dongo on 27 April 1945.

In 1520 a flood moved the mouth of the Adda, which until then had flowed into Lake Mezzola, and the Pian di Spagna became a malarial marsh. The villagers moved up to the slopes and farmed terraces held up by dry-stone walls. In summer they took their cattle up to the high pastures of the upper Valchiavenna, a custom that lasted until the 1950s. In the nineteenth century, under Austrian rule, the course of the Adda was straightened and the plain slowly became farmland again.

On the Mera and in the channels of the plain people used the quatrass, a flat-bottomed boat made of four chestnut planks, for fishing and for carrying cattle, hay and blocks of granite. In 1905 a hydroelectric plant went into service on the Sorico stream at Piazzo. Every year, on 1 and 2 November, the village centre holds the Fiera dei Morti, with its stalls and its livestock area.

At Bugiallo, on the way up the Berlinghera, the church of San Giovanni Battista stands just outside the village. It was already an oratory in 1456; it was enlarged in the mid-sixteenth century and consecrated in 1599 by Filippo Archinti, Bishop of Como. The bell tower, begun in 1637, stands in front of the façade, and behind the chancel is a small ossuary chapel painted in the mid-eighteenth century.

At Albonico, the northernmost hamlet in the province of Como, the church of San Sebastiano was built between 1767 and 1779 and decorated in 1893 by the Tagliaferri brothers of Pagnona. At Dascio the first church of San Biagio already stood in the mid-fifteenth century and was destroyed in 1636 on the orders of Count Giovanni Serbelloni. The present church, with its neoclassical front, was built between 1900 and 1908.

North of the village the Mera leaves Lake Mezzola, and between the two lakes the Pian di Spagna opens out. The nature reserve that protects them, for the wealth of their plants and animals, lies mostly within the comune of Sorico. A loop of nine and a half kilometres, “A balcony over the Pian di Spagna”, climbs in San Miro's footsteps to the Sasso di Dascio, the viewpoint over the reserve and Lake Mezzola, and comes back along the Mera.

Dascio is the old fishing village on the water. From there a six-kilometre path follows the old Via Regina round Monte Peschiera, past old granite quarries, to the small Romanesque temple of San Fedelino on the Mera. The mule tracks of the old parish district also start from Sorico, towards Bugiallo and Montemezzo, and from San Bartolomeo you climb Monte Berlinghera; the Via dei Monti Lariani, which runs along the mountainside above the western shore from Cernobbio, ends here after 125 kilometres.