One most often approaches the lake district from the east, via Lecco on the eastern arm of Lake Como, or as it is locally called the Lago di Lecco. Lecco itself is of no importance. Its site is its all-in-all, but that is delightful. Between Lecco and Milan the highway crosses the Adda by a magnificent bridge of ten arches built by Azzo Visconti in 1335. Very few of the works of the old bridge-builders bear so ancient a date as this. From Lecco to Monza the highroad skirts the Brianza, as the last Alpine foot-hills are called before the mountains flatten out into the Lombard Plain. At Arcore is the villa of the Adda family with a modern chapel.
One can go north from Lecco to Bellaggio by steamer, when he will arrive in the very heart of lakeland, or he may go directly west by the highroad to Como and take his point of departure from there. The Lake of Como was the Lacus Larius of the Romans and the Lari Maxime of Virgil. It is a hundred and ninety metres above sea level and among all other of the Swiss and Italian lakes holds the palm for the beauty of its surroundings.
At Nesso is the Villa Pliniana, built in 1570. It is not named for Pliny, but because of a nearby spring mentioned in his writings. Pliny’s villa was actually at Lenno, in a dull gloomy site and he properly enough called the villa Tragedia.
Como, the city, is ancient, for the younger Pliny, who was born in the ancient municipium of Comum, asserts that it was then a “flourishing state.” It does not enter actively into history, however, after the fall of the Roman Empire, until 1107, when it became an independent city. It remained a republic for two centuries and then it fell under the dominion of the Visconti since which time its fate has ever been bound up with that of Milan.
The Broletto or municipal palace is curiously built of black and white marble courses, patched here and there with red. It is interesting, but bizarre, and of no recognized architectural style save that it is a reminder of the taste of the people of the Lombard Republics with respect to their civic architecture in the thirteenth century. Como’s Duomo is, on the contrary, a celebrated and remarkably beautiful structure. The distinction made between the taste in ecclesiastical and civic architecture of the time can but be remarked.
On the Lago di Como