Valmadrera

Parè is Valmadrera's lakeside part, north of the centre, at the foot of the Moregallo. It has walks along the water, the Parco della Rocca with its panoramic headland and the harbour's sailing clubs, with sailing, windsurfing and kayak courses. Near the pier and the little chapel of the Madonna, not far from the church of Parè, are the remains of the old wash houses, with a spring to which local tradition credits healing powers. In front of the bay lies a large lawn open to all.

The Lecco–Bellagio line boat calls at the Parè pier, linking the villages on the Lecco branch. The timetable is Navigazione Laghi's and changes with the season.

People lived here in Roman times, but there is firm record of the inhabitants only after the year 1000. In the Middle Ages the Vallis Magrera belonged to the pieve of Garlate and was guarded by the castle of San Dionigi. At the end of the thirteenth century the houses stood in small clusters at San Dionigi, Caserta, Ceppo and San Tomaso. In 1296, when Matteo Visconti's Milanese destroyed Lecco, Valmadrera took in the refugees.

In the early sixteenth century the Mandelli family owned some ten houses at Caserta. Towards the middle of the century the Bonacina, wealthy leather merchants, rose in fortune, and the centre of the town moved to the oratory of Sant'Antonio: in 1566 Saint Charles Borromeo transferred the parish there from San Martino. Throughout the seventeenth century the leading families were the Bonacina and the Mandelli. Saint Anthony the Abbot is the town's patron saint, and his feast is on 17 January.

In the centre stands the parish church of Sant'Antonio Abate, whose bell tower, 87.5 metres high including the cross, is among the tallest in Italy. Next to it is the complex that the Mandelli left at the end of the seventeenth century to the friars of the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of God, the Fatebenefratelli. The friars founded a hospice for the sick there and a small pharmacy with its Giardino dei Semplici, where they grew the medicinal plants for their patients; the Riccardo Villa Botanical Garden grew out of it, with medicinal and aromatic herbs and specimens of the area's protected flora.

The sanctuary of San Martino, the town's first parish church, keeps Renaissance frescoes and a late-Gothic Madonna del Latte. Villa Gavazzi has an avenue of lime trees, a private chapel, a landscaped park with its greenhouse and, at the back, the old silk mill, built there to keep the manor and the silk work together.

In the eighteenth century silkworm rearing spread to every farming family, and around the middle of the century three silk mills were built on the channels of the Rio Torto. With the Gavazzi, from the end of the century, Valmadrera moved from craft work to industry. Some years after the Second World War the last silk-reeling mills closed, and then the throwing mills: silk had been worked in the town for more than two centuries.

In 1817 the Gavazzi brothers bought the house that had belonged to the Bonacina and then to the Orrigoni, who had enlarged it in the eighteenth century with a U-shaped wing. Between 1817 and 1820 the Lecco architect Giuseppe Bovara remodelled it and laid out the entrance avenue; between 1820 and 1840 the Gavazzi had the romantic park laid out. In 1834 the chapel of San Gaetano was rebuilt as a small round neoclassical temple with a lantern dome. The villa and the park are private.

A climb lined with the eighteenth-century chapels of the Way of the Cross leads to the sanctuary of San Martino, where the Madonna di San Martino is celebrated on the second Sunday of October. From the sanctuary path 5 climbs to the Sass Negher, an erratic boulder darkened by time on the slopes of the Corno Birone. The Piana di San Tomaso, at 580 metres, is reached by a mule track of about three kilometres with 350 metres of ascent.

The Sentiero delle Vasche follows the gorge of the Inferno stream uphill, past the remains of the dams that carried water to a vanished silk mill. From the hamlet of Belvedere a path climbs to the Sambrosera spring, at 716 metres. From there the paths climb to the Rifugio SEV, at 1,225 metres, which volunteers of the Società Escursionisti Valmadreresi built between 1960 and 1964. A demanding route leads instead to the summit of the Moregallo, at 1,276 metres, with its cross and a small statue of the Madonna.