A shipwreck, five boulders and a coffee: from the cave of a repentant merchant to the café where Chiara wrote the soul of Luino.
“Welcome, wanderer. I am the Boatman. I have ferried merchants, poets and pilgrims, and from all of them I learned one thing: the lake remembers more than it says.”The Boatman
What the narrator asks you. The answer, and the true fact behind it, is for you to find on the spot.
The merchant came down sheer to the lake. You go down by steps, which is more civilised. Here, at the Quicchio car park, begins the stairway to the Sasso: breathe, your calves have already understood.
Here the lake opens like a fan. The Boatman has seen it every day for a lifetime and has still not tired of pretending not to look at it.
Since the sixteenth century, on Wednesdays Luino becomes a market as big as a lake. An imperial concession, a square that since 1826 has also seen the ferries depart.
An elongated octagon, a tall pronaos and no bell tower. Here a feudal lord made himself a church at home, and the village took three hundred years to enter it.