Cannero Riviera

Cannero Riviera sits on the western shore of Lago Maggiore, fifteen kilometers north of Verbania and just south of the Swiss border. About 900 people live here. The fortifications off shore are what remains of the Rocca Vitaliana, built between 1519 and 1521 by Ludovico Borromeo over an earlier castle, the Malpaga, used as a refuge in the early fifteenth century by the Mazzarditi brothers, five pirate brothers who ran the high lake from this base until the Visconti put them down.

The town itself runs as a lakefront row below the promenade, while above it on the slope sits the parish church, and higher still on the hillside, reached only by mule track, is the abandoned frazione of Carmine Superiore with its fourteenth-century church. The settlement is layered from water to hill: fortress ruins offshore, houses and gardens at lake level, a church on the rise, and a dead hamlet further up still. What the water sees from below and what survives on the height above it are the same centuries, read at different altitudes.