Magreglio

In 1535 Charles the Fifth, having taken the duchy of Milan, forbade the keeping of weapons throughout the territory with a single exception: the Valassina, where the wolves were too many. Not only that: here the bounty was sixty imperial soldi for every wolf killed, against the four paid in the bordering areas, fifteen times as much. The last wolf of the valley is said to have been killed in 1880. The village's name says the same thing from another angle: it comes from the Latin ager magris, lean fields, poor pastures, and the poverty is documented down to the details, such as the walnut oil used for the lamp of the Blessed Sacrament. Thirteen years before the ban, in 1522, the men of the valley found themselves fighting between the Ghisallo and the castle of Barni against the French of Odet de Foix de Lautrec, who were chasing Ermete Visconti as he fled from Bellagio: and they pushed them back.

At the top of the climb that starts from Bellagio, on a road cyclists ride constantly, stands the sanctuary of the Madonna del Ghisallo, venerated as the patroness of cyclists. According to the legend the chapel was built by a count Ghisallo who, coming back from a day's hunting, was set upon by a band of brigands: he took refuge in a small shrine, begged the Madonna to save him, and afterwards dedicated the church to her. The place name, originally Güsall, probably comes from a Celtic root meaning a pass. Until the first decades of the twentieth century the church stood to the left of the road; then the positions were inverted, and today the road runs between the church and the cemetery. Little remains of the original building, above all after the changes of the nineteen-sixties wanted by the parish priest don Ermelindo Viganò, whose body is kept inside it. In the comune, finally, the Lambro rises, and at the bus de la stria, the witch's hole, the first traces of human life recorded in the whole Valassina were found.