Vallo delle mura

Above the top of via Bovara, at Largo Montenero, a stretch of masonry keeps faith with the medieval city: the Vallo delle Mura, a surviving piece of the bastion of Porta Vianova and the last visible trace of the walls with which Azzone Visconti turned Lecco into a fortress in 1336.

Why it matters

In the fourteenth century Lecco was not a lake resort but a garrison town. Azzone Visconti, Lord of Milan, enclosed the borgo and its lakeside castle in triangular walls, making the narrow passage between lake and mountains a defended gateway of the Milanese state. Almost all of that fortress disappeared after 1782, when Emperor Joseph II abolished the military stronghold and the walls were torn down to let the modern city breathe. The Vallo delle Mura is one of two surviving fragments, alongside the Torre Viscontea, and preserves a section of the defensive line at the edge of the historic centre.

What to notice

The surviving section corresponds to the bastion of Porta di Vianova. Lecco's fortified layout included a lakeside base, with Porta di Santo Stefano controlling the small port; Porta Nuova to the north; and a south-eastern gate towards Bergamo and the Republic of Venice. A moat fed by the Fiumicella channel separated the walls from their outworks. Adaptations in 1551 included reinforced gates, embattled platforms beyond the ditch and a round gun-tower beside the Basilica of San Nicolò. Another defensive structure survives as the base of the cathedral bell tower, the Matitone.

Context and history

The walls were built between 1336 and 1338, the same campaign that raised the Ponte Azzone Visconti, and they embodied the Visconti strategy of sealing the Adda corridor. Under the Sforza, from 1466, the fortress gained a fortified port and a bastioned Porta Nuova; under Spanish rule Lecco became a full piazzaforte, its defences repeatedly updated for gunpowder warfare, with the last recorded adaptations in 1551. The end came from above: Joseph II's reforms of 1782 abolished the strongpoint, the castle was dismantled and sold to private buyers, and between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries urban and industrial growth consumed the ramparts. What the demolition spared — the tower in the main square and this stretch of wall — now carries the whole memory of fortified Lecco, and Manzoni's account of Lecco cites the walled city as the setting behind the novel's opening scenes.