Taino

In the village park, looking out over Lake Maggiore, there is an instrument that measures the solstice. Giò Pomodoro made it in 1991 and it is called The Place of the Four Cardinal Points: white, grey and pink granite, water and iron, with a tall gnomon pillar at the centre. On the twenty-first of June, at noon, the sun's rays pass through a slit cut inside the pillar and fall on a notch carved in a second monolith lying on the ground, which otherwise stays in shadow. It works once a year, and for a few minutes.

Three thousand seven hundred and sixty-two inhabitants in the province of Varese, on a natural terrace looking over the lake where it ends and becomes the Ticino; it borders only two municipalities, Sesto Calende and Angera. The name is said to come from the Celtic for good wine, or from the Roman family name Taginus. On the coat of arms are the unicorn of the Borromeo and a service tree, probably for the Serbelloni, who held the village until the early twentieth century. On the cobbles there is the wall of Taino: 180 metres at an average of eleven per cent, with pitches of sixteen, which local cyclists call the Tainenberg after the walls of Flanders.