Malgrate

The town carries in its name the memory of a night that went badly. In 1126, while the men of Como on one side and those of Lecco with the Milanese on the other were fighting over the lake, the Lecchesi took advantage of the dark to reach the beach of Antesito, surprised the Como garrison of the little fort known as San Grato in its sleep, and took it; the fort was largely destroyed and some prisoners were executed. Tradition holds that from then on that Grato became Malgrato, bad Grato, and then Malgrate: a name that is a verdict.

Four thousand two hundred and sixteen inhabitants in the province of Lecco, on the last stretch of the lake, directly opposite the city. The Romans called it Antesitum, the beach set in front, because that is how they saw it from the fortifications of Castrum Leuci on the other shore. In the eighteenth century the first patrician villas began to appear, and until the end of the nineteenth the palaces of Malgrate hosted an intellectual and artistic life so lively that it earned the town the nickname of the Venice of the Lario. The parish church of San Leonardo, rebuilt with three bays around 1550, keeps its Counter-Reformation doorway of 1607.