Curiglia con Monteviasco is the least populated municipality in the province of Varese, and it lies entirely on the flank of the Val Veddasca, against the Swiss border: some twenty hamlets and clusters of houses, with bare stone walls, wooden balconies, roofs of stone slabs and paved lanes the locals call rizzada. One of those hamlets, Monteviasco, has no road reaching it at all: you go up on foot, by a path of about a thousand steep steps starting at Ponte di Piero. In 1989 a cable car was built to break its isolation, recognised as part of Lombardy's public transport; in 2018 the permanent residents up there were about fifteen, nearly all elderly.
The municipality as it stands dates from 1928: Monteviasco was joined to Curiglia then, together with the hamlet of Piero, which was detached from the municipality of Lozzo, abolished on that occasion. In Napoleonic times there had already been an attempt to keep Curiglia and Monteviasco together, but it did not last. Towards the boundary with Dumenza stands the sixteenth-century sanctuary of the Tronchedo, dedicated to the Madonna del Latte; and above the village lie the old summer pastures of Sarona and Alpone, with paths climbing beyond the border, onto Monte Lema and Monte Tamaro.
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Near Curiglia con Monteviasco
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
