Plesio has 842 inhabitants in six hamlets scattered under Monte Grona, on the western side of Lake Como; the municipal territory runs from the lakeshore to the summit of the Bregagno, a difference in height of almost two thousand metres. The reason the village exists is a piece of road that was not there: it was impossible to follow the shore beneath the cliffs of the Sasso Rancio, and the natural way to reach Como went higher up, over the saddle of Breglia. Plesio controlled it. The place names still record that road: Logo, where the church of San Sebastiano stands, was sacred to Lugh, whom the Romans called Mercury, god of trade and roads and protector of travellers, while Calveseglio comes from the Latin words for cart and load, because there was a posting station there for changing animals.
The Sasso Rancio stayed dangerous even after the medieval works: Paolo Giovio wrote that only madmen crossed it, and in 1799 an entire squadron of Cossack cavalry of the Austrian army went over the edge into the lake. Higher up, around the summit they call the Ciapp del castell, the walls of a large enclosure survive, and archaeologists read a Bronze Age hillfort in them; Plesio may be one of the twenty-eight castella that surrendered to the Roman consul Marcus Claudius Marcellus in 196 before Christ. Closing the territory on the west is the Sanagra torrent, whose waters were once credited with miraculous properties: the name used to be explained by the Latin sanat aegros, "it heals the sick".
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📅 Every year, on 29 October
On 29 October Plesio celebrates its patron Saint Fidelis the Martyr; the town preserves the tradition of the "festa del Giünee", with a straw effigy burned on 31 January.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Plesio, but an easy day trip away.
