I dipinti di Legro

On the hills above Lake Orta, the hamlet of Legro turned its house walls into a film archive. Since the late 1990s, painters from across Italy and Europe have covered the village facades with scenes from movies shot on this shore, making a stroll through Legro a walk through Italian cinema history.

Why it matters

Legro's murals make its film history visible in the village itself. In the late 1990s the local community, through its recently founded Pro Loco, decided to revive a small farming hamlet of a few hundred inhabitants by painting it. Taking the frescoed village of Arcumeggia in Varese as its model, the project gave Legro a single coherent subject: "Il cinema messo a muro" — cinema put on walls. Every mural refers to films made on or around Lake Orta, so the trail works simultaneously as public art, local history and a record of a chapter of Italian film-making that is easy to overlook. The idea proved influential: similar painted-village projects later appeared elsewhere, including at Amalfi and in the Cadore. Legro is also part of the national "Paesi Dipinti" circuit.

What to notice

The murals recreate scenes from films made on or around Lake Orta, including A Farewell to Arms (Charles Vidor) and Bitter Rice (Giuseppe De Santis), as well as a tribute to the children's writer Gianni Rodari. Later works by students of local artistic high schools add more modern, abstract and fantasy subjects, so the style varies deliberately from classical fresco work to contemporary illustration. The ensemble is titled "Le vie del cinema" (the streets of cinema). The narrow lanes, stone houses and terraced hillside form the setting for the murals. Several panels carry the signatures of their painters, and the murals face the lanes rather than interior courtyards.

Context and history

Legro sits a couple of kilometres from the lakefront town of Orta San Giulio, on the slope rising towards Monte Mottarone, and historically lived in Orta's shadow. The mural project began in the late 1990s when the newly formed Pro Loco, which had already restored the Santa Caterina church complex, launched a public-art project with social and economic aims. The choice of cinema as a theme was grounded in fact rather than invention, because the lake's shores had hosted film productions over the decades, and painting those scenes onto the houses turned local memory into a walkable archive. Artists came from all over Italy and from other European countries, and the project gained coverage in newspapers and on television and radio, extending the reach of the "painted village" idea beyond its Piedmontese and Lombard origins.