Dongo

The iron mines of Dongo appear for the first time in a document of 1465. In 1771 the mines and the works passed to the brothers Giacomo and Antonio Mainoni, born in Leipzig; in 1792 the Rubini took over and built here the first charcoal blast furnace for making pig iron; in 1839 the firm became Rubini-Scalini-Falck, and from that name would grow the Falck steel company. One of the great groups of Italian steel began in a village on the shore of Lake Como, at the mouth of a torrent.

Three thousand four hundred and eighty-nine inhabitants in the province of Como, on the ancient via Regina. On the twenty-seventh of April 1945, at piazza Rubini — the square that carries those ironmasters' name — the partisans captured Benito Mussolini, fleeing from Milan towards the Valtellina; he was executed the next day at Giulino, in the former commune of Mezzegra. In Palazzo Manzi, today the town hall, is the Museum of the End of the War. The three crosses on the coat of arms recall instead that Dongo belonged to the Tre Pievi together with Gravedona and Sorico.