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Dizzasco is located at the beginning of the Intelvi Valley on the western branch of Lake Como. ln strategic position, it lies on a wooded terrace of morainic origin. Thanks to the wide panoramas, this ancient village has been able to reinvent itself and become a renowned holiday resort surrounded by greenery. In the basin below, embedded in a deep valley, flows the Telo stream that flows into the Lario at Argegno. Dizzasco is made up of 3 hamlets: Biazzeno, Muronico and Rovasco.

In the medieval period Dizzasco shared the fate of the entire Intelvi Valley, allied with Como during the ten-year war against Milan. In the Renaissance period it was a fief of the Visconti, the Rusconi and the Marliani. To remember, in the nineteenth century, the patriot Andrea Brenta, a friend of Giuseppe Mazzini, who managed to organize a group of valley dwellers to fight the Austrians. A plaque commemorates him near Muronico.

Parrocchiale di San Sisinio

Here too, as in the whole Intelvi Valley, there are numerous religious and artistic testimonies. Before entering Muronico, you will meet the Parish Church of San Sisinio, with its unusual Greek cross plan. It is among the oldest churches in the Valley. It is an 11th century building that has been remodeled several times in the Baroque era. Inside the church, richly adorned with frescoes and stuccoes, you can admire splendid 17th-century scagliola frontals. Then there is a marble tabernacle from the Renaissance period and an inlaid confessional from the 18th century. Its ancient parish church, rebuilt in the 17th century on a Romanesque base, is dedicated to SS. Pietro e Paolo and extends with a portico on a beautiful panoramic hill. Inside it preserves seventeenth-century canvases, frescoes, stuccos and scagliola altars by Giuseppe Molciani.

Also worth visiting is the oratory of the Blessed Virgin with a beautiful fifteenth-century canvas depicting a Madonna and Child, from the Lombard school. The seventeenth-century oratory of the Confratelli with an eighteenth-century altarpiece by Antonio Ferretti and a beautiful inlaid wooden altar from the seventeenth century. Finally, near the ruins of an ancient convent, we find the oratory of S. Carlo with its seventeenth-century stuccos and frescoes. It should be remembered that here, the English Winston Churchill, an illustrious admirer of Dizzasco and its landscapes, found the inspiration to create his paintings in the quiet of the valley. One of his paintings, with the Church of San Sisinio di Muronico, crossed the borders of the valley to be admired in a London exhibition. Along the valley of the mills, ancient factories are scattered, all dating back to the 18th century. The last mill in the area stopped grinding in 1975.

The invasion of donkeys

But Dizzasco is known for legends and tales about the donkey. Since 2000 the animal has been associated with the inhabitants of Dizzasco and in recent years it has been immortalized by various artists in all its forms. The donkey festival is an artistic, cultural and gastronomic event that involves all the energies of the country to celebrate its symbolic animal. The event takes place in July in the historic center of Dizzasco.

The anniversary wants to honor the project that, year after year, invests the territory. Since its inception, the intention has been aimed at the construction of a cultural pole that would contain two different realities. The first artistic, intellectual whose purpose is the promotion of young artists and reason on the ideas and languages ​​of art itself. The second most popular is closely linked to the territory, traditions and its inhabitants. This is how popular oral tradition merges with contemporary art. It is also for this reason that the donkey is the symbol, the protagonist of every movement in the area.