Acquate and Olate, the village of Renzo and Lucia

Tradition places the village of Renzo and Lucia in two quarters of Lecco, Acquate and Olate, which you meet along the Manzoni itinerary.

For a long time the honour went to Acquate, the farming quarter between the Caldone and Bione streams that looks down on the centre and the lake: here, at a crossing of lanes, tradition sets the meeting between Don Abbondio and Don Rodrigo's bravoes that opens the novel, on the evening of 7 November 1628, and on Via Lucia stands the house traditionally called Lucia's, from whose courtyard you can see the hill of the palace. The scholars of Manzoni's topography, like the Lecco abbot Antonio Stoppani before them, instead recognise Olate, the small neighbouring quarter, as the home village of the two betrothed: there stands Lucia's presumed house, “the house on the main street leading to the church”, and there the church of Santi Vitale e Valeria, where Don Abbondio marries them in the thirty-eighth chapter. Above, on the Zucco promontory, stood the villa identified as Don Rodrigo's palace: built at the end of the sixteenth century by the Arrigoni, a family at odds with the Manzoni, it passed to the Counts Salazar and was pulled down in 1937, when Villa Guzzi, by the rationalist architect Mario Cereghini, rose in its place.

1. 01In Acquate: the church of San Giorgio at the top of the Salita dei Bravi, the rebuilt bravoes' shrine with the plaque quoting the first chapter and Lucia's traditional house on Via Lucia; then on up to the churchyard of the Madonna di Lourdes sanctuary, with the view over the city and the lake.
2. 02In Olate: Lucia's presumed house on Via Caldone, private and not open, with the remains of a sixteenth-century Annunciation over the door; and the church of Santi Vitale e Valeria, rebuilt in 1767 and reworked in 1934, which keeps only its bell tower from the novel's time.
3. 03Villa Guzzi, on the Zucco hill where the palace stood, is seen from Acquate and Olate; the rest of the Manzoni itinerary, Pescarenico, the bridge and Villa Manzoni, is down in the town.

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