Imbersago

Between Imbersago and Villa d'Adda Leonardo's ferry still runs, one of only two surviving examples in Italy. It has no engine: it is hooked to a steel cable stretched between the two banks, and to cross you simply set it at an angle and let the current of the Adda push it. One person works it, and it carries up to a hundred passengers and five cars. Whether Leonardo really invented it is not certain, but the drawing exists: he made it during his stay at Vaprio d'Adda in 1506 and 1507, it is dated 1513 and is in the Windsor Codex, and it shows a ferry identical to this one. The cable version in use today came into service in 1678, by agreement with Villa d'Adda; in December 1991 the ferry was stopped as no longer meeting safety rules, and it took the shipwrights of Venice two years to build an identical one, inaugurated on 22 May 1994.

The village's name says the same thing as the ferry: from the Celtic ambersāk(on), "place of the river", because the settlement lies in a bend of the Adda. Scholars tried Ambrose, the prefect of the Gauls and father of the saint, and the estate of one Limbricius, but it is the Celtic that explains it. In the church of San Paolo, the oldest in the village, the envoys of Saint Charles Borromeo found in 1567 four burials of the Landriani family — the same family that had run the ferry since 1512 — and ordered them moved outside within two weeks on pain of excommunication: at the follow-up visit nothing had been done. In the wood above the village stands the sanctuary of the Madonna del Bosco, raised between 1641 and 1646 to a design by Carlo Buzzi, of which Pope John XXIII was very fond.