Ranco

In the school year 1940-1941 the elementary schoolmaster of Ranco was Giovanni Rodari: he taught the third and the fourth classes and ran their examinations. At that time Ranco was not a comune, it was a frazione of Angera — and it had happened before. Napoleon had annexed Ranco and its frazione of Uponne to Angera in 1809, and the Austrians had restored it in 1816; then Mussolini did the same in 1928, and the comune became autonomous again only in 1956. The name says what was done to this land: Ranco comes from the verb rancàr or roncàr, that is to fell, to clear and burn the woods; and Uponne comes from Aupone, a warrior of the tenth century. The fortunes of the village always followed those of the fief of Angera and its rocca: right here, in 1276, the battle of the Guazzera was fought between the Visconti and the Torriani.

The whole Lombard shore of Lake Maggiore is rich in erratic boulders, but Ranco has gathered more of them than anywhere else: the debris produced by the landslides of the Alps, dragged down by the glaciations, ran aground more often on the northern flank of the hill of San Quirico. The most famous is the Sasso Cavalaccio, the Sass Cavalasc, lying on the shore and recognised as a natural monument by a regional law of 1983; to go looking for these very old documents of geology there are itineraries made for the purpose. In the fourteenth century part of Ranco belonged to the monastery of the Umiliati of San Lorenzo of Cannobio and part was a fief of Gian Galeazzo Visconti; in the following centuries the whole territory passed to the Borromeo, feudal lords of Angera. In 1850 Ranco was a few houses and a church, and it was already one of the favourite destinations of the Milanese aristocracy, drawn by the beauty of the place and by the hunting and fishing: the two real trades stand in the coat of arms of 1962, a vine with a bunch of grapes for the land and a silver fish for the lake. Between 1914 and 1940 there was even a tram stop, on the Varese-Angera line.