Valsolda

The eleven fractions of Valsolda are distributed along two distinct altimetric bands. Saint Mamete, the municipal seat at the mouth of the Soldo stream, is the historic port of the valley, with its 11th-century Romanesque bell tower and 17th-century lazaretto. Cressogno e Lower and Upper Albogasio dot the lake shore with period villas and private docks. Oria, facing the promontory of San Mamete, preserves the home of Antonio Fogazzaro, now a FAI property. On the slopes of the mountain, Castle it stands on a rocky spur at 720 metres, guarding the church of San Martino with its seventeenth-century frescoes; Lodge, Puria, Drano e Dasio They are rural agricultural hamlets nestled among terraced vineyards and olive groves, accessible via ancient paved mule tracks. Each hamlet preserves fountains, wash houses, and votive chapels that bear witness to the daily life of an Alpine-lake community.

Saint Margaret It is a unique hamlet in the Ceresio panorama: a very small inhabited nucleus nestled on a narrow inlet on the Valsoldese shore, reachable only by lake by boat or via a steep panoramic path starting from Albogasio Superiore. The village preserves a 12th-century Romanesque church with a rare fresco dated 1427 depicting Saint Margaret of Antioch, and the remains of a lazaretto where during the Manzonian plague of 1630 the infected people of Valsolda were confined. In the 1940s and 1950s Santa Margherita was also the starting point for a panoramic funicular which connected the lake basin with the plateau of Lanzo d'Intelvi: the structure, dismantled in 1977, is remembered today only by a few period photographs and a short stretch of track that remains as a memorial.

Few Italian territories boast a literary density equal to that of Valsolda. Antonio Fogazzaro he set his masterpiece here Small ancient world (1895), making the hamlet of Oria the emotional and narrative setting of the novel. The Swiss-German writer Hermann Hesse, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, painted a watercolor of Lower Albogasio during one of his stays on Lake Ceresio, now preserved in a private collection. Brunella Gasperini, pseudonym of Bianca Robecchi, one of the most popular Italian journalists and writers of the second half of the twentieth century, chose San Mamete as her summer residence for over thirty years. More recently, since 2015, the writer Emiliano Bezzon He set some of his noir novels in Valsolda, helping to keep alive the tradition that makes the valley an exceptional literary setting.

Between the The sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Valsolda gave birth to generations of artists who exported their art throughout Europe. The family Well, originally from Puria, included architects and painters active in Milan, Vienna and Rome. The family Little faces, from Castello, was a protagonist of the Lombard Baroque. The family Get along I will include characters such as Isidore, architect active in the courts of Poland. The family Lezzeni, from Albogasio, supplied plasterers for the Habsburg territories. Among the most singular cases, Carlo Ceroni worked at Węgrów in Poland, where a street still bears his name today, and Paul Pagani (1655-1716) di Castello was a court painter between Vienna, Prague and Moscow. A story documented today by Pagani House Museum, the only exhibition space in Europe dedicated to artistic emigration from Valsoldo.