Parco Civico Teresio Olivelli

Where the Tremezzo lakefront widens between the church of San Bartolomeo and the gardens of Villa Carlotta, the Teresio Olivelli Civic Park offers what the grand villas do not: public green space with a monumental staircase stepping straight down to the water. Designed in 1925 within the rationalist reform of the shore, it is the borgo's shaded living room.

Why it matters

The park is a notable example of public landscape on the Tremezzo shore. Created in 1925 in a reworking attributed to the rationalist architect Pietro Lingeri, the same designer whose crisp modernist villas reshaped the mid-lake in those years, it keeps a monumental lakeside staircase and a decorative games structure from that campaign, and it carries the name of Teresio Olivelli, honoured in connection with the Italian Resistance. For the municipality of Tremezzina, which administers it as the Parco Comunale Teresio Olivelli, it is both a heritage landscape and a working public amenity, hosting the summer concert life of the LacMus festival on its lawn by the water.

What to notice

The 1920s design is marked by the axial composition, the wide steps of the monumental staircase descending to the water, and the lattice-form tarocchiera, an element of eighteenth-century type re-proposed in the 1925 design. Mature trees and flower beds shape the park’s landscape. Monuments and installations inside the grounds recall Teresio Olivelli and the Resistance, anchoring the park's commemorative role.

Context and history

Until the interwar years the Tremezzo shore was a sequence of private villa grounds; the 1925 redesign of this section, connected with the rationalist architect Pietro Lingeri, turned part of that frontage into planned public landscape, combining garden art with the new architecture then transforming the lake. The park was later named for Teresio Olivelli, remembered for his sacrifice in the Resistance, and monuments within the grounds keep that memory present. Under the municipality of Tremezzina, formed in 2014 by the amalgamation of Tremezzo with Lenno, Mezzegra and Ossuccio, the park is managed as the Parco Comunale Teresio Olivelli, Its lawn and steps have also become a signature venue for the LacMus international festival, which stages concerts facing the lake.