Hikes near Lecco, within 25 km

Eleven hikes within 25 km of Lecco: the Resegone, Monte Barro, Moregallo, the Piani Resinelli below the Grigne and the Val d'Era above Mandello del Lario.

Lecco has a piece of luck that few towns can claim: the mountains begin where the streets end, and the Resegone, Monte Barro and the Grigne form the backdrop to almost every view of the town. For anyone who lives there, or comes up from Milan, it means a proper hike a few minutes' drive away and home in time for dinner. On this page we have gathered our hikes that start within 25 kilometres of the town, on the eastern branch of Lake Como, in the Triangolo Lariano and towards the Valsassina.

The quickest are the protected path on Monte Barro, Alpe Giumello with Monte Croce di Muggio and the igloo bivouac on Monte Due Mani, which lends itself to a sunset outing. For a classic morning there are the Piani Resinelli and Rifugio Rosalba, among the spires of the Grignetta, or the Monte San Primo loop; for a full day, Monte Cornizzolo by the Romanesque complex of San Pietro al Monte, the Moregallo from Sant'Isidoro, the grassy ridges of Boletto and Bolettone and the eastern ridges of the Resegone, which weave between dolomitic towers. The Via del Fiume in the Val d'Era, above Mandello del Lario, is a protected path among small waterfalls and pools at the foot of the Grigne, and if you want to go further there is the Rifugio Benigni loop in the upper Val Gerola.

Good to know

It is hard to write about Lecco without passing through Manzoni. The opening line of The Betrothed, ‘That branch of Lake Como which turns towards the south’, describes precisely this arm of the lake, enclosed between two chains of mountains, and the writer knew the places well: he spent his childhood and adolescence in the family villa at Caleotto, which now houses the Museo Manzoniano. Pescarenico, with Fra Cristoforo's convent, is one of the novel's settings that can still be recognised, and Lucia's famous farewell to the mountains rising from the water is addressed to the very peaks we see from these paths.

The Grigne, meanwhile, belong to the history of climbing. Riccardo Cassin and, later, Walter Bonatti learned their craft on the limestone of the Grignetta, and it was in Lecco, in 1946, that the Ragni climbing group was founded, carrying the town's name to mountains all over the world. From the Piani Resinelli, where those towers are close enough to study, it quickly becomes clear why.