The name Cernobbio has two explanations and neither has won. One traces it to the cenobium, the Cluniac convent of Benedictine nuns recorded from the year 930 on the site of today's Villa Gastel, around which the first houses are said to have gathered. The other starts from Cernobulum, a variant of cerniculum, sieve: the place where building sand was sifted from gravel. The village began in Roman times as a lake harbour on the via Regina, and the annexes to the Como statutes of 1335 name the men de Cernobio as those bound to keep up the stretch of that road passing their doors.
In 1432 men of Cernobbio jailed at Bellagio for tax debts were freed by neighbours who forced the doors. Filippo Maria Visconti, lord of Como and Milan, sent Vincenzo Vegio: the leading citizens shut themselves in a tower, which was stormed; the rebels were hanged and the village destroyed. A long decline followed, and the plague of 1630 left Cernobbio with 190 inhabitants, the lowest count in its history. It stayed a fishing village until the nineteenth century, when the Bernasconi weaving mills, founded in 1872, brought offices and workers' housing around the factory: a silk citadel still among the few industrial heritage sites of the Como area.
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📅 Every year, on 22 January, in the shrine that was once the parish church
Cernobbio celebrates Saint Vincent, martyr and deacon of Zaragoza, on 22 January. The Shrine of San Vincenzo, one of the town's main places of worship, was the ancient parish and provostal church until 1935.
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 Cernobbio, but an easy day trip away.
