Lavena Ponte Tresa

Here Lake Lugano ends and the river Tresa begins, and the border with Switzerland runs exactly across that point. On the two banks stand two villages with almost the same name: Ponte Tresa on this side, in Italy, and Ponte Tresa on the other, today part of the Swiss comune of Tresa. What holds them together is the customs bridge, which is also the reason the Italian village exists at all: Ponte Tresa came into being around 1846, after the bridge was built.

The older part of the comune is Lavena, which until 1927 gave it its whole name. Its old centre is made of two nuclei: the locality of Castello, which can be traced back to the twelfth century, and the locality of Villa, which took shape in the first half of the eighteenth century. The village grew in the nineteen-fifties, when work across the border and the arrival of families from southern Italy took it from about thirteen hundred inhabitants to the more than five thousand of today.