Historical outline

VIII - XIV

The historic centre of village with its characteristic stone roads, quite far from the lake, attests the antiquity of the village; in fact Germignaga, being located at the mouth of the Tresa river, during the years, has extended little by little, because of alluvium.
The first document in wich our village is mentioned,dates back to 807, when an a bill of sale it is said that Germignaga balnged to the county of Seprio; in that period it was a centre of prefecture of the whole valley, and this privilege lasted for several years, as it is detected in another document of 1174 where it was called Zermignaga.
The ancient fortress of Germignaga should date back to the year 1000; it is situated in the current cementary perimeter, that was still in good conditions when in 1276 the battle of Germignaga took place, in which trups let by Ottone Visconti from the lake and the “Torrianis” fought together.
There isn’t any trace about this fortress because at the end of 800 its ruins were used to build riverbank alongside Tresa river. In the XII century in a lot of documents we can notice the presence of an important montly market, situated in “INFUSFORUM”.
In a parchment of 1347 in Borromeo’s archive there are documents which testify the presence in Gemignaga of a fishpond equipped for overfishing of the lake.