Sarnico

Sarnico sits at the southern end of Lago d'Iseo, where the Oglio river drains the lake toward the Po valley, twenty-five kilometers east of Bergamo. A document from 861 records the emperor Ludwig II donating the local piscaria to the monastery of Santa Giulia in Brescia, which makes Sarnico's fishing trade older than most things on the lake. The medieval centro storico still reads as a market town.

The second layer arrived in the early twentieth century, when the Faccanoni family commissioned Giuseppe Sommaruga to build a string of Liberty villas along the shore road toward Predore. Villa Faccanoni, Villa Surre and the family mausoleum are among the most coherent stretches of Italian Art Nouveau outside Milan. The Riva shipyard, founded here in 1842, still builds wooden motor yachts on the lakefront. Most weekenders come from Bergamo and Brescia for the lake; the buildings are why architecture students come.