Between 1885 and 1886 Giovanni Segantini stayed at Caglio, and here he painted one of his most important pictures, Alla stanga. The village has not forgotten it: today it is an open-air museum, with panels devoted to his works along the streets, and there is also a monument to the painter, the work of Paolo Troubetzkoy. The name, instead, is said to come from a flower: the caglio, common all over this mountain, which on the town's arms is represented by a stylised narcissus. Caglio lies in the Larian Triangle and has followed the fortunes of the Valassina: a fief of the Dal Verme at the beginning of the fifteenth century, then of the French, then of Milan again under the Sforza, then of the Sfondrati, and at last Austrian. In the past it was a land of stonecutters, and it shows: the old centre is made of houses of bare stone, with serizzo doorways and narrow streets, and there is also a tower-house.
The old parish church, the Romanesque church of Santa Valeria, formally stands inside the comune of Sormano: it has a Greek cross plan and keeps fourteenth-century frescoes with the Madonna del Latte and the titular saint holding her sons Gervasius and Protasius. In the Campoè district there is the sanctuary of Santa Maria, which became one after a presumed miracle in 1626, holding a Madonna del Latte between two music-making angels dated 1508. Today's parish church, Santi Gervasio e Protasio, was remade between 1615 and 1660, has a serizzo portal with the date 1728 and keeps frescoes by Andrea Appiani; and there is a chapel which during the plagues served as a lazaretto, called of the Dead of the Plain. In a small garden in the centre there is still the ice-house, shaped like a little cottage, in use until the end of the fifties, and along the streets one finds a stone table on which people once played the game of nine men's morris. In 1807 a Napoleonic decree annexed Caglio to Lasnigo, and the Restoration made it a comune again; from 1928 it was joined with Rezzago and Sormano in the comune of Santa Valeria, and became autonomous once more only in 1947.
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📅 Every year, on 19 July
On 19 July Caglio, a municipality of 430 inhabitants in the province of Como, celebrates its patrons Saints Gervasius and Protasius (santi Gervaso e Protaso).
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