Grandola ed Uniti

The «ed Uniti» of the name refers to the six villages joined in the making of the comune, but joining and unjoining them was the work of a century and a half. Already in 1751 the comune was made of five of today's six frazioni: Naggio, Velzo, Codogna, Cardano and Gonte. Then, on 2 October 1798, a law of the Cisalpine Republic detached the land of Naggio, which formed a comune of its own; the autonomy did not last, because by 1805 Naggio is recorded again as a frazione of Grandola, and it is probable that the re-annexation had already happened in 1801. In 1812, when Napoleon ordered the concentration of the smaller comuni of the Kingdom of Italy, the territory came to include also the lands of Bene and of Grona; the Austrians abrogated the decision after Napoleon's fall, but in 1927 Bene Lario, Grandola and Grona were again reunited under a single comune, and only in 1950 was Bene Lario definitively detached.

In the age of the comuni this land counted for the control of the transit on the via Regina, the road between the lake of Como and that of Lugano: in the locality of Codogna there remain the ruins of a signal tower which served to pass messages as far as Como, today inside the fir wood of villa Boccalari, and that is the tower topped by a flame which stands in the comune's coat of arms, granted by royal decree of 29 August 1929. The Statutes of Como of 1335 name «Grandolla» as the comune which, inside the pieve of Menaggio, was charged with the maintenance of the stretch of the via Regina between the field of Pozollo and the bridge de Chollio: a road, that is, that the village had to keep at its own expense. In 1751 the comune was no longer enfeoffed, though for its redemption it still had to pay a sum of money every fifteen years. At Naggio, the highest of the frazioni, the parish church of Sant'Antonio Abate keeps the remains of frescoes of the late thirteen hundreds and a triptych with Saint Sebastian and Saint Roch made by Giovan Antonio de Rubeis in 1490.