The name comes from bar, a word of Celtic origin meaning pasture. A Roman road ran through here linking Milan to Bellagio, and a diploma of Otto III, in 998, gave the territory to the Benedictine monastery of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan along with the whole district of Bellagio: in that document the place is written Barnasci. Above the village stand the ruins of the castle of Tarbiga, built between the tenth and eleventh centuries to bar the road that, through three gates in the wall, led into the rest of the Vallassina. It had a double ring of walls, and the two rings had different jobs: the upper one held the spaces of the castellan and the garrison, the lower one was there to take in the people and the livestock in case of siege. In the middle of the fourteen hundreds a captain of the Sforza militias, attacked in these mountains by the men of the Vallassina, took refuge in Tarbiga and had to surrender; in September 1452 the men of Barni solemnly took possession of it and obtained leave to give it to a nobleman who bore the village's name. The pass was garrisoned until 1578.
The people of Barni used to emigrate to the Valchiavenna and to Switzerland, and what they took to sell were the local snails, which were prized, along with the little cheeses and the chestnuts. In the sixteen hundreds the Ravizza, the doctors of Barni, were held to be real experts at curing with herbs and plants, and the same work was taken up again in the nineteen-forties and fifties by a priest of the village. After the second war the place became one of the mainstays of the valley's economy thanks to a mineral water plant: the spring is called San Luigi, and the story goes that Carlo Borromeo drank there because it was the only one not contaminated by the plague. On the coat of arms there is a tree: it is the beech of Barni, el fò, a monumental tree that a whirlwind brought down in 1926. Barni was a hamlet of Civenna from the end of the nineteen-twenties until 1950, when it became a comune again. And in 1987, at the Conca di Crezzo, an airliner came down: there is a monument to the dead of civil aviation.
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📅 Every year, on 29 June
On 29 June Barni, a municipality of 597 inhabitants in the province of Como, celebrates its patrons Saints Peter and Paul; on 17 January the incanto of Saint Anthony is held.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Barni, but an easy day trip away.
