Lierna

In 951 queen Adelaide was held prisoner, in secret, in the castle of Lierna. She had been shut up there by Berengar II, who had seized the kingdom of Italy on 15 December 950, after the death of her husband, king Lothair II: he wanted to force her to marry his son Adalbert. Adelaide was freed by Martino da Bellagio, went on to marry Otto I of Saxony and became empress, and kept coming back to Lierna. From that episode Gioachino Rossini drew his opera Adelaide di Borgogna. The castle, which gives its name to the hamlet of the same name, is a fortress built on a small peninsula jutting into the lake; its ruins are today embedded in the houses around it.

The village lies on the eastern shore of Lake Como, eleven square kilometres divided among a dozen hamlets. The first notarial document naming it is from 854, but the Romans had been here before, wintering their legions for the mildness of the climate. In the early Middle Ages Lierna belonged to the monks of San Dionigi in Milan, and for that reason, when the ten years' war between Milan and Como broke out in 1118, it took the Milanese side and lost a tower for it. The church is dedicated to Saint Ambrose, patron of Milan, and its Romanesque bell tower, of the year one thousand, is among the oldest in Lombardy. Independence came late: disputed for more than two and a half centuries between Mandello and Varenna, Lierna became a municipality of its own only in 1743.