Cassina Rizzardi

On the windy night of the fourteenth of March 1900, at three o'clock, a fire that started from the Corte dei Balditt spread through the whole village and spared just three buildings: the Porro Lambertenghi villa, the town hall and the little church. La Provincia di Como of the following day counted 230 people left homeless, adding however that most of them were insured. The name of the municipality comes from there: Cassina is the farmstead, and Rizzardi the noble family of Como to whom the surrounding lands were enfeoffed in 1322.

The villa has run through the whole history of the village and then broken away from it. Count Luigi Porro Lambertenghi attempted there, in 1815, a first experiment with a steam-powered spinning mill; marquis Giberto, who died in the war in 1917, left the little church to the municipality with the obligation to demolish the flyover that connected it to the villa. Turned into a hospital, then a socio-educational centre and a vocational school, since 1978 it has stood abandoned and stripped of its works of art; the Province of Como has put it up for auction several times without selling it. Three thousand one hundred and seventy-five inhabitants.