Lesa

History and places of interest

Municipality in the province of Novara, overlooking the Piedmont shore of Lake Maggiore.
The municipal territory includes the hamlets of Solcio located on the shore of the lake, between Meina and Lesa and the hilly hamlets, Calogna and Comnago, on the surrounding hills.

HISTORY

Both the archaeological finds discovered in the 19th century, now disappeared or lost, and the toponyms of clear Celtic and Roman origin suggest a very ancient origin.
In Roman times, the Via Severiana Augusta passed through Lesa, a Roman consular road that connected Mediolanum (modern Milan) to Verbannus Lacus (Lake Verbano, or Lake Maggiore) and from there to the Simplon Pass (in Latin Summo Plano).
The oldest mention of Lesa appears in a document from 998. A few years later, in 1014, Emperor Henry II donated the village of Lesa to the nuns of the monastery of San Felice di Pavia.
Since 1199 Lexia has been the administrative center of Vergante under the archbishops of Milan and later the Borromeo family, seat of the Castellano of Vergante and then of a Podestà until the beginning of the last century, despite having already lost much of its economic and political importance since the end of the Middle Ages.
In 1748, with the Treaty of Aachen that put an end to the War of the Austrian Succession, Charles Emmanuel III of Savoy obtained the upper Novara area which thus entered the Kingdom of Sardinia.
At the end of the 18th century the Community of Vergante dissolved under the pressure of the Napoleonic armies and the new European order. Since 1805 Lesa has been in the Department of Agogna, part of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy.
With the fall of Napoleon, like all of Vergante, in 1815 Lesa returned to the Kingdom of Sardinia and then, in 1861, to the Kingdom of Italy.

PLACES OF INTEREST

- CHURCH OF SAN ROCCO: located in the hamlet of Solcio, it was built in neoclassical style in the first half of the 19th century, with frescoes in the pendentives of the dome.

- MANZONI MUSEUM: in Palazzo Stampa, a neoclassical villa where Alessandro Manzoni stayed with his second wife, you can visit the Sala Manzoniana where books, manuscripts and parchments relating to the life and works of the writer are collected.
Some display cases display letters and treatises by the philosopher Antonio Rosmini as well as memorabilia and manuscripts by the writer Giulio Carcano, a friend of Manzoni.

- VILLA CORRENTI-CAMPARI: with a large park and private landing place, it was built at the end of the 19th century.

- VILLA CAVALLINI: inside, among the various decorations, there is a fresco depicting Dancing girls in a landscape scene of this same location.

- CASTELLO FLORIO: with a large park, it was built at the beginning of the 19th century with the aim of reproducing the structures of medieval castles.