Patron saint festival In 74 days
Saint John the Evangelist and Lake Montorfano
📅 Every year, on 27 December
Montorfano celebrates Saint John the Evangelist on 27 December, in the church overlooking the lake that gives the town its name.
The name means orphan mountain: Mons Orphanus, that is far off and detached from the other heights around it. The same oddity befalls the water, because the lake of Montorfano too keeps to itself, round and isolated in the middle of the plain, and in the municipal arms the two orphans stand together, the lake drawn in its round shape and the hill with the ruins on top.
Those ruins are of a castle that served to see far: it was part of a chain of fortifications linked by sight that ran from the upper Valtellina to the Baradello of Como. After the defeat of Tassera, in 1160, the soldiers of Frederick Barbarossa took refuge there, and perhaps the emperor himself. In 1413 Giacomo Mandelli, of the counts of Montorfano, won in a tournament the hand of Elisabetta Rusca, daughter of the lord of Como: Italian and German princes watched the contest, and even the king of Hungary and Bohemia, and that marriage brought a period of peace between Milan and Como. The parish, Ambrosian in rite and in diocese, passed to Como only in 1982. Two thousand six hundred and nineteen inhabitants.
The Montorfano guide
🎉 Festivals and feasts in Montorfano 1
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Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Montorfano
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Places to see within 25 km
Outside Montorfano, but an easy day trip away.
chiesa di San Donato 📍 Massimino · 9.3 km The parish church of San Donato in the hamlet of San Vincenzo, baroque, built between 1818 and 1820. monastero di Santo Stefano 📍 Millesimo · 14 km Baroque church and fifteenth-century cloister, Cistercian until 1802, now inside a private castle. castello di Millesimo 📍 Millesimo · 15 km Dismantled in 1553 so the French could not take it, the thirteenth-century keep is open again. Castello di Cairo Montenotte 📍 Cairo Montenotte · 20 km The ruins of the Del Carretto castle above Cairo Montenotte, in the upper Bormida valley. Ferrania Film Museum 📍 Cairo Montenotte · 20 km Six themed rooms in Palazzo Scarampi for the plant that made Ferrania a name in world cinema. castello di Dego 📍 Dego · 24 km Ruins at Cua, above the Val Bormida, and a Napoleonic path that climbs up to them.