Dumenza

The man who stole the Mona Lisa was born here. Vincenzo Peruggia, who came into the world on 8 October 1881 at Trezzino, one of the hamlets, the son of a mason, learned the trade of house painter as a boy and in 1907 emigrated to Paris; hired by a firm, he was sent to the Louvre to clean the paintings and cover them with glass. On the morning of Monday 21 August 1911, the museum's closing day, he took the picture off the wall, got rid of the frame and the glass on the staircase of the Sept Mètres room, wrapped it in his jacket and walked out without anyone stopping him. He kept it with him for two years and would have liked to sell it to the Uffizi, maintaining that his had been a patriotic act and that Italy would know better how to value the work. Tried in Florence on 5 June 1914, he got a year and fifteen days, reduced on appeal on 29 July to seven months and eight days. He died on 8 October 1925, on his forty-fourth birthday. His daughter Celestina remembered that as a little girl, in the village, they called her «Giocondina».

A painter comes from here too: Bernardino Scapi, known as Luini, one of the Leonardeschi, born at Dumenza around 1481. Underneath, there is a far older layer. Two stone corbels carved with human faces, found in the church by the parish priest Parapini, bear the date 909 and now stand at the base of the tower; but these districts appear already in an eighth-century document recording king Liutprand's gift of the lands of the Valtravaglia to the monastery of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro in Pavia. The bell tower of San Giorgio, at Runo, seems to have had a military function before the year one thousand: the road that came from Varese to Luino and then here was the only way to Bellinzona, the lakeside road not yet existing, and the tower was probably part of a system of lookouts along these valleys. The one at Runo is the only one left.