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Isola Viscontea (Lecco)

Ramo di Lecco

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The Isola Viscontea, or Pescarenico island, is an islet of about 110 metres in the river Adda, in Lecco, a few metres from the Pescarenico lakefront and beside the Azzone Visconti Bridge. It is private, cannot be visited, and since 2025 has a new owner who intends to make it a tourist-hospitality venue.

History

It is probably not a natural island. The 15th century brought long arguments about the nearby bridge, the Ponte Azzone Visconti: it was blamed for causing the lake floods that inundated Como’s square, and even though the idea proved wrong the river bed was widened and around and after 1440 three arches were added to those already there. The excavated material probably piled up near the bank and, to let the water flow better, the channel that now separates the island from the mainland was dug. The origin remains uncertain all the same, and one popular site even gives it as 19th-century. From its shape and decorations a use as a small fort and military outpost is inferred, then as a fishermen’s house. The first maps showing it, still without a house, are from 1723 and 1753.

The only building, to the south and topped by a circular tower, was lived in until 1956, when the owners were refused permission to build a bridge to the mainland; then the island was rented until 1961 and the owning company, which took over at the end of the 1950s (in 1959 according to Il Fatto Quotidiano), used it occasionally for weddings and receptions. It also hosted a trattoria, but since 2011 it was abandoned. Between 2011 and 2014 the association Appello per Lecco, under an agreement with the owner, opened it to the public with visits, cinema and theatre: according to the press over 35,000 people came, with the help of about 120 volunteers. From 2015 a dispute with the owner stopped everything again. A decree of January 2013 had declared it of particularly important historical-cultural interest, and in 2013 the FAI had placed it 121st in the Luoghi del cuore.

The owners put it up for sale several times, in 2018 for just under two million euros, and the Comune never exercised its right of pre-emption. On 4 July 2025 the agency that handled the deal made known that it was taken over by an Italian company intending to carry out a tourist-hospitality scheme; the price was not disclosed; Il Giorno’s headline speaks of a luxury hotel with a Michelin-starred restaurant, but the agent said only “tourist hospitality”. The spokesperson of Appello per Lecco said he hoped for a public function.

What to see

The island is a little over a hundred metres long and under thirty wide, with nearly all of it a tree-lined garden (1,500 to 1,600 square metres of green according to the sources) and, to the south, the house of nine rooms and two bathrooms, about 140-146 square metres, with the two-storey tower. It can be seen from the Pescarenico bank and from the Azzone Visconti Bridge, with the Adda’s current between the Lecco branch of the lake and Lake Garlate.

Practical information

  • The island is private and not open to the public (eccoLecco); visits happen only on rare occasions.
  • We found no 2026 news on the project or works, nor on openings.

Sources

On the map

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