Orino

Orino has been annexed three times, and each time it has come back. The first town council was elected in 1831, but the village had already been joined to Gemonio in 1809 and to Cuvio in 1812; in 1927 it was Orino that took in Azzio and changed its name to Orino-Azzio, and in 1956 the whole thing was undone. The population, meanwhile, has stayed what it always was. Even the name is borrowed: it seems to come as an offshoot of the place called Oro, which is a hamlet of that very Azzio.

What does not move is the Rocca. Twenty minutes' walk into the woods, at 525 metres, there is a walled quadrilateral defended by heavy towers: the first documents that name it are of 1176, the rebuilding is Visconti and Sforza work, and in 1513, when the Duchy of Milan fell apart, Swiss troops moved in — the first of a series of occupations that dismantled it. It is on the coat of arms granted in 1962, and local legend puts a ghost in it as well. Another legend tells that in 389 Saint Lawrence appeared wrapped in flames on the spot where the church that bears his name now stands and, together with troops arriving from Milan, drove out the Arians who had taken the Rocca; in front of that church stands a lime tree of about two centuries, listed as a monumental tree. Higher still, on one of the peaks of the Campo dei Fiori, is the Forte di Orino: a strongpoint of the Cadorna Line, built in the Great War against an invasion that might come through neutral Switzerland.