Moltrasio

The arms of Moltrasio changed their mind about the village's name. In 1909 the council drew up one with the mountains enamelled black: the black of the Moltrasio stone, because the name would come from mons rasus, «mountain stripped of vegetation». The arms actually granted in 1929, on the other hand, put trees on the three mountains and choose the other theory, mons laricum, the mountain of larches. There are a third and a fourth explanation too — the place where mortar was got, «molta» in dialect, and simply lying among the mountains — and none has won. The gold of the field, though, is not in dispute: it alludes to the wealth the inhabitants made by quarrying the stone.

The village was already an independent comune in 1058, and in 1335 it was charged with maintaining a stretch of the via Regina, the road that climbed from Como towards Chiavenna. In 1522 it was sacked by its rival Torno, and in 1630 the plague struck it hard: the Romanesque church of Sant'Agata, of the second half of the eleventh century, then served as a lazaretto, and under the plaster recently removed its frescoes have reappeared. At villa Lucini Passalacqua, which here they call «the palace», Carlo Porta spent his holidays and Vincenzo Bellini came now and then; in the villa's chapel are some early-medieval reliefs that once stood in the basilica of Sant'Abbondio in Como.