Griante

The first time the village appears in a document, in 1335, it is for a duty: some annexes to the statutes of Como assign to Griante the upkeep of the stretch of the via Regina between the valley of the torrent de Carono and the field of Pozollo. In the fifteen hundreds it was a burg, a cluster of buildings that at need could close itself into a citadel; the wars fought by the French and the Spanish for the Lario carried it away. On the map of the duchy of Milan frescoed in the Gallery of Maps, in the Vatican, the village is written Griano. And on 22 January 1619 a boat loaded with Moltrasio stone went down off Cadenabbia, leaving no trace at all.

Cadenabbia, the hamlet on the water, became an address in the eighteen hundreds. Stendhal set pages of the Charterhouse of Parma there; the Ricordi music publishers had a villa there, and tradition has it that Verdi wrote some arias of La Traviata in it; Longfellow dedicated verses to the place. Queen Victoria stayed there, and tsar Nicholas II, and kaiser Wilhelm II, and Konrad Adenauer came back every summer, so much so that they gave him honorary citizenship and then a statue. To the English community that settled here at the end of the century is owed the Anglican church of the Ascension, built between 1890 and 1891. There is also a church that is not what people say it is: San Giuseppe is held to have been built in 1600 by a merchant, portrayed in the altarpiece with the Holy Family, but the building is of the second decade of the twentieth century, and in the altarpiece, beside the family of Nazareth, there are two saints.