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LeccoPlaced at the eastern branch of Lake Como, Lecco is a typical industrial city, with a nineteenth-century dignified and austere face. It looks like satisfied of being part of one of the most spectacular natural sceneries along the Alps’ Range, positioned as it is on the edge of the lake where the river Adda flows out. An unrepeatable concert of waters and mountains, seeming to protect, hold, skim over it, like a dance marked by the colours of the sky and the seasons going by. The lake seeping into the city and the river Adda, whose uncertain course now goes fat and then lingers into the luminous wide stretches of Garlate and Olginateò the roundish peaks of Corni di Canzo and Mount Barro on the west "dialogue" with the rough and broken outline of Resegone and Grigne: real "totem" mountains for Lecco and the Lombardy region. We invite you all to take off the apparently bad-tempered bark of the city and discover its history: along the iron rather than the silk thread, or the evocative suggestions that still push thousands of tourists to remake the imaginary map of the love-story between Renzo and Lucia - protagonists of the worldwide known novel "The Betrothed", by Alessandro Manzoni, set precisely in Lecco. Promenade and Piazza CermenatiThe heart of Lecco is just nearby the lake, where two squares are linked together as one: opened on one side towards the water and backwards towards of a number of little and narrow streets. This little bit of the lake used to be the Milanese fleet headquarter, that during the first decades of the XX century, waited here to attack the city of Como. However most of all, this beautiful city boasts deep commercial roots: since 1149 Lecco has housed one of the biggest market in Upper Lombardy, real fulcrum of important international negotiations about iron, silk, wood, cheese and goods of any kind. The market was so crucially important that even the plague in 1630 did not stop it. It used to be set in the current Piazza Cermenati and porticoed Piazza XX Settembre. A coloured group of stands livened that historical space until a few years ago… when, due to some accessibility problems, was moved to a decentralized area. Among the fascinating crown of ancient commercial houses in Piazza Cermenati – so called in honour of the local geologist and Alpinist Mario Cermenati (1868-1924) – rises the fifteenth-century "Prepositura", with porticoed courtyards and internal arcades; the neoclassical Palazzetto del Pretorio; overlooking Piazza XX Settembre, the Palazzo delle Paure, neo-Gothic reconstruction of the Dogana over the ruins of the Medieval Town Hall, where it is still visible the Visconti’s coat of arms. |
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