Domaso

The via Regina passed through Domaso, the Roman road that linked the river port of Cremona to Chiavenna by way of Milan, and the village had to maintain it as well: the annexes to the Statutes of Como of 1335 assign to Domaso, within the pieve of Gravedona, the upkeep of the stretch running as far as the middle of the mole of Vercana. The importance of that road can still be seen in the houses: along the via Regina the façades are decorated with votive frescoes, stone portals and family coats of arms, which is what happens where trade passes — this was the privileged way of linking the lake to Switzerland. The municipal arms too are born from a painting: a seventeenth-century fresco on a palace that housed the Spanish troops garrisoned at the fort of Fuentes, in the Pian di Spagna.

Villa Camilla was built in the first half of the seventeenth century as the seat of the Ghezzi family and has since changed hands many times: the Calderara, Vittoria Peluso who inherited it in 1806, the Lampugnani in 1837, the English Hills in 1866 and finally Giuseppe Sebregondi in 1903, who enlarged the garden and gave the house the name of his wife, Camilla Barbiano di Belgioioso. In 1955 the Sebregondi heirs gave it to the comune, which still has its offices there, and in the garden more than a hundred varieties of camellia grow. The boundaries of Domaso, too, have moved a good deal: a Napoleonic decree of 1807 attached Vercana to it, and the Restoration revoked that; in 1928 Vercana came back and with it the suppressed comune of Livo, and both were re-established in 1950.