Angera

Angera was a port for centuries, and its oldest name says as much: in the sources of the tenth century it is called Statio, the station, the point at which goods changed their means of transport. Here arrived what came up the Po and the Ticino and what came overland along the via Severiana Augusta, bound for the Alpine passes; and from here the stone of Angera and the timber of the upper Verbano set out for the building sites of Milan. In 1497 Ludovico il Moro granted it the title of city.

In 1636, during the Thirty Years' War, the French set out to close the waterway between the lake and Milan: they fitted out a ship with four cannon, put a hundred musketeers aboard her and stationed her in front of Angera. The Spaniards then armed a number of boats and after some fighting forced her to withdraw down the Ticino. In the marshes just beside the town, in 1776, Alessandro Volta noticed that a gas was rising from the water which could catch fire: he isolated it two years later and called it inflammable air of the marshes. It was methane.