Careno

This guide to Careno on Lake Como starts with what's missing from this hillside: a road. The only way in is on foot, down some three hundred stone steps, or by boat to the small harbor by the church, true since at least 1240, when Careno was its own tiny comune. You'll hear how generations of quarrymen built every house here from Moltrasio limestone hauled off the mountain above, and how the village outgrew its Romanesque church and quietly demoted it in favor of a newer one up the slope. Along the way it covers the fossil hunters who spent decades pulling ammonites out of a passage in the rock overhead.