Mesenzana

Mesenzana first swallowed its neighbours and was then swallowed by them. In the Napoleonic age, in 1809, it was given Brissago, Grantola and Roggiano, and from a village of a few hundred souls it jumped at once to more than a thousand; then the three went their own way and Mesenzana became as small as before. A century later the movement reversed: on the first of December 1927 a royal decree merged Brissago, Roggiano Valtravaglia and Mesenzana into a new comune called Brissago Valtravaglia — a merger the local administrations themselves wanted, chiefly for economic reasons — and this time it was Mesenzana that disappeared inside somebody else's name. It came back into existence on 30 May 1953, when a presidential decree re-established it as an autonomous comune.

For a place of this size the numbers are the history. The inhabitants were three hundred and ten in 1751 and four hundred and one in 1805; after the Napoleonic annexations they passed a thousand, then came back down to five hundred and seventy-eight in 1853 and rose again to seven hundred and twenty-eight in 1901. The municipal coat of arms arrived only in 1956, three years after the name was won back: before that there had been no time. In the parish church there is an organ of 1866, the work of Adeodato Bossi Urbani.