The festival

The church of Santo Stefano is one of the oldest and most significant witnesses in the region. Documented in 1078 and linked to the history of the parish district, it preserves a memory that spans almost a thousand years of religious, artistic and community life.

Its fascination lies in the layering of periods and languages: the Romanesque character of the bell tower, the late-Gothic transformations of the fifteenth century, Renaissance interventions and Baroque enlargements. Frescoes, stuccoes, wooden choir stalls and works by Ticinese artists such as Francesco Antonio Giorgioli and Giuseppe Antonio Felice Orelli form a true archive of regional memory.

Rather than a monument to a single period, Santo Stefano is a place where time accumulates and becomes legible. Each intervention adds a page to the story of the community that has preserved, transformed and handed it down.

The church of Saints Biagio and Maurizio in Torricella is documented from the fourteenth century, but its present appearance is the result of later transformations combining late-Gothic and Baroque elements. Its gently sloping churchyard is one of the festival's most evocative open-air halls, with a broad view toward Lake Lugano.

The church's richness is expressed above all in the stuccoes of the presbytery, choir and altars. Local and nearby artists worked here: Galeazzo Riva of Lugano, Francesco Bellotti of Torricella and Giovanni Battista Adami of Carona contributed at different times to the embellishment of the building.

Torricella does not tell of the exceptional gesture of a single genius, but of the strength of a craft handed down through families, workshops and generations. It is a precious example of how the art of Ticinese stucco workers transformed a village church into a place of refined Baroque intensity.

Casa Rusca was built in the nineteenth century as the stately residence of Vitale Rusca. The park, with its terraced layout and romantic-neoclassical taste, tells of a different form of civic beauty: not a church, not a square, but a garden conceived as a space of representation and contemplation.

In the twentieth century the place changed function: acquired by the Municipality of Cureglia, it became part of the village's public life. The gate created by Livio Vacchini in 1997 added a contemporary sign to a historical layout, creating a subtle dialogue between nineteenth-century memory and modern sensibility.

In 1212 Prince-Bishop Federico Vanga entrusted the reconstruction of the Cathedral of San Vigilio in Trento to Adamo da Arogno, a Ticinese architect. Craftsmen from Gandria also worked around that great building site.

The link is not architectural resemblance, but devotional memory. Returning home, the men who had worked in Trento brought with them the cult of San Vigilio, patron saint of the Trentino city.

Behind the apparent quiet of the village lies the story of men who left the lake to contribute to one of the great medieval building sites of northern Italy, bringing back to their own village not only skills, but also devotion and memory.

The church of Santa Maria Assunta in Sorengo preserves one of the oldest memories of the territory. Its origins are Romanesque, and the building, transformed over the centuries, preserves eleventh- and twelfth-century frescoes rediscovered during several twentieth-century restorations.

Annunciations, Christological symbols, saints, fragments of Marian figures and a series of Apostles on a blue background bear witness to a pictorial language linked to the medieval Lombard tradition. For their quality and age, these frescoes are among the most precious examples of Romanesque painting in Ticino.

Sorengo tells a story different from that of the great emigrant masters: not prestige gained elsewhere, but the depth of local memory, capable of preserving images and traces impressed for almost a thousand years.

The church of Sant'Abbondio in Gentilino is one of the most scenically evocative religious buildings, reached along a path lined with tall cypresses. Its origins are ancient, but its present appearance took shape mainly in the seventeenth century, with an elegant and restrained Lombard-Baroque language.

Inside, works and interventions from different periods coexist: the fifteenth-century fresco of Saint Anthony Abbot, the Rosary painting by Giuseppe Antonio Petrini of Carona, the ossuary decorated by Bartolomeo Rusca, the modern stained-glass windows by Fra' Roberto Pasotti and other elements showing the artistic vitality of the community.

Sant'Abbondio tells how a community gives value back to what it has received. Not through a single great name, but through a long sequence of gestures, donations, works and interventions that transform the church into a shared heritage.

In the heart of Montagnola, just a few steps from the places linked to Hermann Hesse, Sala Boccadoro is one of the most recent expressions of the area's cultural vocation. It is an intimate space designed for chamber music, recitals and encounters in which the closeness between artists and audience becomes part of the experience.

Its presence beside the Hesse Museum creates a natural bridge between literature, music and reflection. In this landscape, which in the twentieth century attracted writers, artists and intellectuals, listening is not only a musical gesture, but an inner disposition.

Sala Boccadoro reminds us that culture does not belong only to the past. It is a choice that takes responsibility for renewing itself in the present, through places capable of generating attention, encounter and dialogue.

The Collina d'Oro School Centre, designed by Livio Vacchini in 1979, brings the story of Ceresio Estate's places into the twentieth century. It does not yet preserve an ancient memory, but offers an important civic vision: the growth of new generations.

The large inner courtyard, the monumental staircase and the rigorous geometry of the whole reveal the ambition to build a structure able to dialogue with the village without imitating it. Works by Ivo Soldini, Fernando Lardelli, Harry Balart and Nena Airoldi further enrich the complex.

If the churches of the region tell what previous generations left as heritage, the School Centre tells of a community that chose to invest in the future, in education and in the quality of shared space.

The church of San Cristoforo in Caslano was built in the seventeenth century, incorporating an older oratory already documented in the fourteenth century. The harmonious and intimate building bears witness to the artistic vitality of the Malcantone and to the Baroque taste that characterized many churches in the region.

Inside are stuccoes, frescoes and interventions from different periods. Alongside the Baroque decorations, the mosaic by Aurelio Gonzato, a modern painter from Chiasso, the 1964 Mascioni organ and the works of Adelchi Maina, an artist from Caslano, show how the dialogue between art and community continued into the twentieth century.

San Cristoforo reminds us that the heritage of the Ceresio is the result of patient, collective and continuous work, able to leave traces in the places of daily life through successive generations.

Paradiso's Town Hall Square represents the contemporary face of a municipality that changed profoundly during the twentieth century. From an old village of fishermen and silk workers, Paradiso has become a lively tourist locality on the lake and a privileged residential place.

The square does not tell a medieval or Baroque story, but the present of community life. It is a well-kept, open and functional public salon, able to host events, meetings, markets, concerts and shared moments for residents and visitors.

In this sense it is a civic equivalent of ancient squares and churchyards: the place where a contemporary community chooses to recognize itself, meet and invest in the quality of its public life, among the sculptures of Ivo Soldini at the foot of San Salvatore.

The parish church of Melide preserves the memory of one of the most important figures in late-sixteenth-century Roman architecture: Domenico Fontana. Born in Melide in 1543, Fontana became the trusted architect and engineer of Pope Sixtus V.

In just a few years he played a decisive role in transforming the city: he opened new roads, built aqueducts and fountains, reorganized the links between the great basilicas and oversaw the famous transport of the obelisk in Saint Peter's Square in 1586, one of the most impressive technical feats of his time.

The prestige gained in Rome also touched his native village. Domenico and Marsilio Fontana contributed to the enrichment of the parish church, where an inscription from 1603 still recalls the architect of Sixtus V. Melide thus tells of success returning home, transformed into shared memory.

The church of Saints Fedele and Simone overlooks the lake from one of the most evocative points of the Ceresio. Built between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries on medieval remains, it preserves inside a precious Renaissance relief attributed to the Rodari workshop, a family of sculptors active on building sites in northern Italy.

The artistic history of the village also opens toward Rome. Antonio Raggi, one of Gian Lorenzo Bernini's most important collaborators in Baroque Rome, came from Vico Morcote. His work contributed to the decoration of churches, fountains and monuments that still shape the face of the city today.

Vico Morcote therefore tells of talent that sets out: the capacity of small villages overlooking the lake to generate artists destined to work in major European centres without their bond with the place of origin dissolving.

Spazio Garavello 7 tells the story of contemporary Morcote. Created as the roof of the municipal car park, it makes a large functional infrastructure disappear by transforming it into a panoramic place overlooking the lake and, at the same time, into a space where people can gather to share cultural moments.

The terrace, with its covered area, green lawn and open view of the Ceresio, shows how even a functional intervention can add value to a historic village without distorting it. The architectural gesture does not erase the context, but offers a new point of view on it.

It is also an example of a place that seizes the opportunity to reinvent itself, becoming a collective belvedere in which the landscape becomes an integral part of the cultural experience.