Strada Regina (Cammino della Regina)

Before ferries and shore roads, one route carried all traffic on Lake Como's western shore. The modern Strada Regina project documents parts of the historic road between Sorico and Como, including Roman alignments, cobbled mule tracks and lanes that once formed a highway toward the Alps.

Why it matters

The road's name reflects its historical status. Tradition liked to explain "Strada Regina" as the road of a Lombard queen — Theodolinda is the usual candidate — but the regional itinerary page follows the documented reading: regina here is a latinised form of strada regia, the "royal" or principal public road, paved and maintained under statutes shared by the lake communes. The name appears in a document of 1187, and the road it named was already ancient then.

Its importance came from geography. When Milan became the capital of the Western Roman Empire at the end of the third century, control of the Alpine passes became vital, and the road converging on Como — the military and commercial outpost towards Raetia — became a trunk line towards Chiavenna and the Splügen pass, linking the Po valley with Chur and, beyond it, the Rhine and the Danube. The official Cammini della Regina guide notes that the axis appears on Erhard Etzlaub's 1500 ROMWEG map, a route toward Rome and part of the wider Francigena system.

What to notice

Surviving sections include stone-paved trackbeds near the Mera outflow and medieval paving between lakeside settlements. The road's fabric also includes shrines, bridge abutments and wash-house sites associated with the pre-modern highway. The UNESCO-listed Sacro Monte di Ossuccio lies along the historical route.

Context and history

The road's later history is one of slow marginalisation. Only in the second half of the nineteenth century was the ancient alignment fully absorbed into a carriage road — the ancestor of today's SS340 — and the old trackbeds survived as farm lanes, alleys and forgotten paving. The Società Archeologica Comense rediscovered and studied the historic sections, with a landmark conference in 1995. The modern revival came through the cross-border project "I Cammini della Regina", funded under the INTERREG Italy–Switzerland cooperation programme 2007–2013. It restored and marked portions of the historic route from Como to Sorico as part of a network toward the Alpine passes. The road's successive layers include a Roman strategic axis, the medieval communal highway documented under its 1187 name, and its modern heritage interpretation.