Sala Comacina

The name is said to come from the sala, that is from the place where the taxes owed to the Lombards who had conquered the Isola Comacina were collected. In 1335 the annexes to the statutes of Como list Sala and Colonno together among the places bound to keep up a stretch of the via Regina, between a certain bridge at Colonno and the valley of the Premonte. The comune was called simply Sala until 1863, when a royal decree gave it the name it has now. With its neighbours it has been put together and taken apart twice: in 1807 Napoleon annexed Colonno and Ossuccio to it, and the inhabitants went from fewer than five hundred to more than a thousand; from 1928 to 1950 the three villages were a single comune, called Isola Comacina.

On a point near the mouth of the Premonte stands a villa of the late seventeen hundreds, inside a park laid out by Giuseppe Balzaretti. It belonged to Giulio Beccaria — son of Cesare and uncle of Manzoni, buried in the village cemetery — and then to Cesare Cantù; but they call it villa Rachele because of two women who owned it one after the other, Rachele Beccaria and Rachele de Marchi. And it was in this house that the husband of the second, Emilio de Marchi, wrote «Col fuoco non si scherza». In the arms of the comune there are a red castle, the one that stood here, two swords for the struggles between Milanese and Comaschi who fought over it, and a green mitre, because the village belonged for a time to a bishop of Como.