Marchirolo

From here to the Swiss border at Ponte Tresa is three kilometres, and this village has lived that fact in every way. On Monte La Nave stand the fortifications of the Cadorna Line, built in 1918 facing a neutral country; on the walls of the old centre the frescoes of local artists tell of the emigration of the people of Marchirolo in the nineteenth century. Then there is the story for whose sake all the rest is worth telling: during the German occupation and the Italian Social Republic, Fernando Torreggiani, a Catholic anti-fascist, saved from deportation the six members of the Jewish family Melli Rossi of Ferrara and guided them across that border. In 2001 the Yad Vashem institute of Jerusalem declared him Righteous Among the Nations.

Three thousand three hundred and eighty-one inhabitants in the north of the province of Varese, along what in Roman times was the road from Milan to Lugano. The pieve of San Martino was created in 1633 by the bishop of Como Lazzaro Carafino, detaching it from that of Agno and adding Cunardo, taken from the Valcuvia. On the ridge overlooking the lake of Lugano stands the little church of San Paolo, of 1352.