Porto Valtravaglia

The name comes from the fishing ports: there were three, and only one survived the building of the road towards Laveno. "Valtravaglia" was added in 1863, and in 1928, when the province of Varese was created, the municipality took in Muceno and Musadino, the two villages of the plateau that people here simply call the Valley. Earlier still, about the middle of the tenth century, Otto I had granted the fief of Travalia to the archbishop of Milan, and the archbishops held it for centuries, appointing as castellans of the rock of Caldè the Sessa, a family of Lombard stock who at Ticinallo acknowledged no feudal authority above them. The rock was destroyed by the Swiss in 1523.

What changed the village, though, was glass. In 1759 Felice Cioja and Carlo Mellerio opened a works at Porto making sheet glass, carafes and crystal glasses; by 1774 forty men, forty-nine women and many children worked there, and part of the workforce came from far-off countries: their surnames have stayed in the village — Griner, Asciamprener, Klingly. In the Napoleonic period the economist Melchiorre Gioia wrote that the purity of Porto's glass was famous, little inferior to that of Bohemia; under the Minetti the works reached a hundred and seventy hands. Of that industry few traces remain today, and the village lives on cross-border commuters, on crafts and on visitors, many of them German.