Lasnigo

The church of Sant'Alessandro stands alone on the top of a little hill, along the road that leads from Erba to Bellagio, and it is one of the most important Romanesque buildings of the Valassina: a thirteenth-century bell tower, a cycle of fifteenth-century frescoes and a Crucifixion painted in 1513 by Andrea De Passeri of Torno; around it, the eighteenth-century chapels of the Way of the Cross. It was left alone for a precise reason: in the thirteenth century the Lambro flooded so many times that the people left the area round the church and rebuilt their houses on the other bank of the river. That this was always a place people passed through is shown by the flint arrowheads and the prehistoric huts found in the territory, by the Roman road that linked Milan to Bellagio and by a gravestone recalling one Caius Alebus, a soldier.

The village was walled, with two towers, and in the middle ages it chose Milan: it stood with her in the ten years' war against Como and joined, together with Asso, the Lombard League. A deed of 1414 attests a castle. Then came the feudal lords: first Tomaso Tebaldi of Bologna, from 1533 the Sfondrati, until the last of them died in 1788 without heirs and the whole Valassina went back to the ducal chamber. In 1807 a Napoleonic decree annexed to Lasnigo the comuni of Magreglio, Barni, Caglio and Sormano: the village, which counted a little over five hundred souls, found itself with nearly two thousand people, until the Restoration undid it all. The old trades are in the names of the places: the Fornace, where a kiln is documented from 1430 and was found again in 1977; Pra Marcà, where a market was held; the Canavee, the terraces on which hemp was worked. And until the middle of the twentieth century there were the picasass here, the craftsmen who worked stone.