Argegno

This guide to Argegno, on Lake Como, opens behind a shuttered stone barracks where border guards once slept unaware that half the village dealt in weapons past their door. It follows nearly two centuries of nighttime traffic on the mountain trails above town, from the spalloni who hauled coffee, cigarettes and sugar over the Swiss border after Napoleon's monopoly on salt and tobacco, through the customs guards and fascist militia who later held that same barracks, to the Emanuele Artom partisan brigade that formed in these hills after Italy's 1943 armistice. Their wooden-framed packs, called bricolle, carried thirty five to forty kilograms apiece up trails guards patrolled by night.