In 1566, after a pastoral visit, someone wrote a curt sentence in Latin about the church of the convent of San Bernardo, at Lezza: oportet destruere dictam ecclesiam, this church must be destroyed. Eighteen years later the curia of Milan no longer listed it among its churches, and one would have said it was finished; instead it is still standing, and the supposition is that rather than pulling it down they merely restored it. Inside there are still the late Renaissance stuccoes, the wall paintings of the late sixteenth century and, in a service passage behind the altar, the fifteenth-century monograms of the Servites.
Those Servite friars had come specially from Florence in 1482, summoned by the villagers themselves, and they stayed until 1779. The municipality, four thousand three hundred and forty-five inhabitants in the province of Como, was called simply Ponte until 1928: then, when Lezza was annexed, it became Ponte Lezza, and that name lasted barely a year before giving way to Ponte Lambro. It lies in the heart of the Alta Brianza, crossed by the Lambro and overlooked by Monte Puscio, on the peninsula that divides the two arms of Lake Como.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Ponte Lambro
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Places to see within 25 km
Outside Ponte Lambro, but an easy day trip away.