Tremezzina

The Tremezzina stretches along the western shore of the central lake, opposite Bellagio. The four villages that have formed the comune since 2014 follow one another for about five kilometres along the Regina main road, with no single centre, and some old hamlets sit on the hillside a little above the shore.

From south to north come Ossuccio, with Isola Comacina offshore and the Sacro Monte behind; Lenno, on the bay closed by the Lavedo headland, where Villa del Balbianello stands; Mezzegra, with the hamlets of Bonzanigo and Giulino; and Tremezzo, with Villa Carlotta. The bay of Lenno is also called the Golfo di Venere, a name Cardinal Durini gave it in the eighteenth century. The Greenway links the villages on foot, and the C110 bus and the boats stop along the shore.

Tradition places on the Lavedo headland the 'Comedy', one of Pliny the Younger's villas on the lake, and in 1847 some Roman columns were recovered from the lake bed off Lenno. In the sixth century Isola Comacina was a Byzantine fortress. In the twelfth-century wars between Como and Milan the island sided with Milan, and in 1169 Como's troops, allied with Frederick Barbarossa, razed it. The islanders who survived fled to Varenna, on the eastern shore. The seat of the pieve was moved to Ossuccio, to the village that later took the name Isola.

In the eighteenth century the Brentano family of Tremezzo traded in Frankfurt: Peter Anton Brentano, born in Tremezzo in 1735, was the father of the poet Clemens Brentano. On 28 April 1945, at Giulino di Mezzegra, partisans shot Benito Mussolini and Claretta Petacci.

Villa Carlotta, in Tremezzo, was built at the end of the seventeenth century by the Marquesses Clerici. In 1801 it was bought by Giovanni Battista Sommariva, who filled it with sculpture and paintings: the museum holds Adamo Tadolini's Cupid and Psyche after Canova and a Thorvaldsen frieze. In 1850 Princess Marianne of Orange-Nassau gave it to her daughter Charlotte, after whom it is named. The eight-hectare park, on seventeenth-century terraces, was planted in the nineteenth century with camellias, azaleas and rhododendrons; the great flowering comes between mid-April and mid-May.

Villa del Balbianello, at the tip of the Lavedo headland, was built in 1787 for Cardinal Angelo Maria Durini, with a loggia open on three sides above the water. The explorer Guido Monzino left it to the FAI in 1988. The villa is reached from the Lido di Lenno in twenty-five minutes on foot or five by taxi boat, and has weekly and seasonal closing days.

Isola Comacina, the lake's only island, is about six hundred metres long and can be reached only by boat. After 1169 it stayed empty for centuries. Excavations begun in 1914 have uncovered the remains of the basilica of Sant'Eufemia and of other medieval churches, and in 1940 Pietro Lingeri, an architect born in Tremezzo, built three artists' houses there. On the last weekend in June the Sagra di San Giovanni recalls the burning of 1169 with fireworks over the island and a mass among the ruins.

Above Ossuccio, the Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine del Soccorso climbs through the olive groves to the sanctuary, with fourteen chapels built between 1635 and 1710. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2003, together with the other Sacri Monti of Piedmont and Lombardy. The walk up takes a good half hour.

In Lenno, beneath the nave of the parish church of Santo Stefano, lies a crypt from the late eleventh century, and beside the church stands the octagonal baptistery of San Giovanni, from the same century. In Mezzegra Giulio Quaglio painted the vault of the parish church of Sant'Abbondio in 1716; a few steps away, in the hamlet of Bonzanigo, Palazzo Brentano has ceilings attributed to the same painter. In Ossuccio the Romanesque church of Santa Maria Maddalena has a bell tower crowned by a late Gothic belfry of stone and brick.

On the hill above Lenno, the abbey of Acquafredda, documented from 1142 with a gift of land to the Cistercians of Morimondo, keeps frescoes by Fiammenghino from 1621. From here a mule track climbs to San Benedetto in Val Perlana, a Romanesque abbey at about 800 metres that can be reached only on foot. Olive trees grow on the terraces around Ossuccio: the oil is made in small quantities, and the harvest falls between late October and November.