Gera Lario

In a farmhouse at Gera was found the architrave of a temple dedicated to Jupiter, now in the Giovio archaeological museum in Como: it bears an inscription recalling a vow made to that god by the Auneuniates, the pre-Roman people of this place. Of the Romans there also remain a necropolis in the hamlet of Sant'Agata and a mosaic by the church of San Vincenzo, which was built in the fifteenth century over a Romanesque church, which in its turn stood where in Roman times there had been a small temple and a villa: beneath the present floor the remains of the columns of the Romanesque nave can still be seen. Through here ran the via Regina, the road that joined Cremona to Chiavenna by way of Milan. Not far off, at Ponte del Passo, excavations have brought to light ancient Olonio, with the foundations of a late Roman building — where a coin bearing the effigy of Constantine turned up — an apsed oratory, a proto-Romanesque church of three naves and the remains of the tower of Olonio, destroyed by the Swiss in the sixteenth century.

Olonio was also the seat of the pieve, until 1444, when it was moved to Sorico because the floods of the Adda kept drowning it. Between the twelfth and the sixteenth century Gera belonged to the Republic of the Three Pievi, until in 1512 the Grisons conquered the whole upper lake and held it until 1524; once the territory was retaken, the Spanish made Gera an outpost of their own. From 1580 the fief of the Three Pievi belonged to the Gallio family, that of cardinal Tolomeo, and on the municipal coat of arms are still his lion and the three red crosses of the pievi. The comune has been called Gera Lario only since 1929. On 8 August 1951 a flood killed 17 people: in their memory, six years later, a votive lighthouse was built at the end of the pier, and the church of Our Lady of Fátima, badly damaged by the water, was reconsecrated in 1963 as the sanctuary of the fishermen.