Lecco

Lecco - Branch of Lecco

Lecco is panoramically the most beautiful town on Lake Como. Here the Adda river leaves the Lario, forming the Garlate Lake; all-around it a large circle of rocky, bizarre-shaped mountains: the Resegone, Due Mani, St. Martino and on the other side of the lake, the Moregallo. The tourist, sport and mountaineering importance of Lecco is of notable importance (the ragni di Lecco - Lecco spiders are famous, enhanced by excellent ski lifts).

Inhabited in the prehistoric age, a fortified village, and then a Roman municipal, important village in the Middle Ages, a free Municipality in the 12th century, therefore enemy to Como during the ten year war, Lecco then passed under the yoke of Della Torre and the Visconti. Proverbial is the laboriousness of the people of Lecco, in the Middle Ages in the working of the cocoons and the spinning of silk, nowadays in the iron-and-steel and metallurgic industry, Lecco today places itself among Lombardy's most active centres.

The historical centre, almost void of architectonic monuments, is characterized by a dignified nineteenth-century building trade, for the most part modelled by the interventions in neo-classical key of Giuseppe Bovara, a minor student of Luigi Cagnola. Lecco's most illustrious son is certainly Antonio Stoppani (1824-1891), natural sciences scholar, but Lecco's fame is connected above all to Alexander Manzoni who, as a child, lived in the 18th-century villa of Caleotto (today the Manzoni Museum), and here was inspired when writing many pages of his book I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), and to whom the town has dedicated a statue by Francesco Confalonieri; the monument was inaugurated on October 11, 1891 in the presence of Giosuè Carducci who, for the occasion pronounced the discorso di Lecco (Lecco speech) which served to debunk the poet's aversion for the great novelist. Do not forget to make a trip to Valsassina and the Piano dei Resinelli, among the Dolomite peaks of the Grigne a very charming place.