Casalzuigno

Arcumeggia, the only frazione of this comune, is a painted village. In 1956 the provincial tourist board decided to turn it into one, and the painters came — Aligi Sassu, Ernesto Treccani, Achille Funi, Aldo Carpi, Remo Brindisi and many others — working in fresco on the outer walls of the houses. Before that Arcumeggia had been a comune, and for a century it was passed from hand to hand: in 1809 a decree of Napoleon suppressed it and annexed it to Vergobbio, in 1812 it passed to Cuvio, with the Austrians it was restored, it reached three hundred and three souls in 1871 and then emptied, because the mountain was not being industrialised, down to the two hundred and forty-five residents of 1921; in 1927 fascism decided the definitive suppression, uniting it to Casalzuigno. The name is far older and comes perhaps from a Roman fortification called arx media, the middle fortress, or arcu media, halfway along the natural arc that the valley draws between Valcuvia and Valtravaglia.

The oldest core of the comune, Zuigno, is Roman: it appears in the Codex Diplomaticus Langobardiae as Sovinium, from the patronymic Sovinnus, and in 1903, digging the road from Cittiglio to Luino, a gravestone of the late empire came out with the inscription «Pico filio Ciamicio Atepo patri», together with twelve Roman tombs holding a coin of the time of Titus and some bronzes of Claudius, of Maximian and of Constantine. A document of 852 tells that a Lombard woman named Adelburga had entrusted her lands at Sovino to the administration of a priest called Lupone. From the fifteen hundreds the village is marked instead by another family, the Della Porta, notaries come from Porto Valtravaglia: in 1560 Giroldino Porta bought at Zuigno an old monastery and turned it into his own residence, and at the beginning of the seventeen hundreds Giovanni Angelo III enlarged it and added the gardens on the occasion of his wedding with Isabella Giulini. A flood, in 1755, carried away some of the statues of the garden staircase. The family died out in 1814 and the house passed to the Bozzolo, whose name it still bears: today villa Della Porta Bozzolo belongs to the Fondo per l'Ambiente Italiano.