Claino stands up high, Osteno on the shore of Lake Lugano, and the name of the comune keeps both because both have always been two: two separate parishes and, in the communal age, two castles, one for each settlement, guarding a junction that led into and out of the Val d'Intelvi. One of those castles, however, is where people now go to mass: the parish church of San Vincenzo grew out of the Romanesque chapel of the castle of Claino, and it still shows. The church has no facade — it is wedged without a break among the buildings around it — and is entered by two doors on the south side, one of them with a late Gothic doorway from the early fifteenth century.
As for Osteno, it put its own lakeside tower on the coat of arms; the arms were adopted by the comune on its own, with no formal decree of grant, and the gonfalon is a white cloth. San Vincenzo holds a terracotta high relief of the Adoration of the Shepherds by Marco Antonio Prestinari, who came from Claino: it is the model for the work the same sculptor later made in Milan Cathedral, so that the village keeps the sketch and the cathedral the statue. A little further down, near Osteno, the rock does the same job: a deposit of the Moltrasio Formation preserves Jurassic fossils with the soft parts imprinted, such as Squaloraja polyspondyla. A place that keeps the impressions.
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📅 Every year, on 29 June for Osteno (Saint Vincent on 22 January for Claino)
Claino con Osteno, a municipality of 543 inhabitants in the province of Como, celebrates two patrons: Saint Vincent for Claino, on 22 January, and Saints Peter and Paul for Osteno, on 29 June.
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 Claino con Osteno, but an easy day trip away.
