Hello and Buongiorno!
It is July 2021, and I’m in Italy,
and I’m halfway up a mountain in the rain.
I’ve been hiking for about an hour through this:
endless trees,
a single lonely stretch of tarmac,
and a constant light drizzle,
or as we call it where I come from,
summer!
But hopefully it’s going to be worth it, because at the top of this road…
I think we’ve found something…
I think we HAVE found something!
This is the grand entrance to the legendary 1960s holiday resort of Consonno,
where they used to say "the party never ends!"
Until one day,
it did.
My day started in a small town called Calolziocorte
in the region of Lombardy in northern Italy,
and this is where I’m climbing up from.
We’re about an hour north of Milan,
and not far, geographically at least,
from the glamour and charm of the famous Italian lakes.
Calolziocorte itself though is not really a tourist destination.
But in 1960 one man decided he wanted to change that.
Big time.
Count Mario Bagno was an extravagantly wealthy entrepreneur from Milan.
He’d made an absolute fortune from the construction of roads and infrastructure
during Italy’s postwar economic boom
and now he had one dream:
to build the ultimate party town.
A holiday resort with every leisure activity you could possibly want,
and several more that you didn’t.
And 600m up in the mountains above us here, he had found the perfect spot for it -
a traditional little hillside village called Consonno.
(As the residents were about to find out.)
But more about that in a bit,
because we haven’t even gone through the entrance yet.
This building was once supposed to be Il Pavesino,
a luxury panoramic hotel and restaurant.
It wasn’t the original entrance to Consonno;
when the resort first opened,
visitors were welcomed with a very authentic 1960s medieval castle gate.
This was intended to be a major upgrade,
but unfortunately, it was never finished.
Consonno itself was abandoned before construction could be completed
and since then it has stood guard over the entrance as a silent concrete skeleton.
Part of me wants to just stay here and go exploring the upper floors
but this is nothing compared to what’s down the road
and to be fair you can see quite a bit of the upper floors without even going upstairs.
So I’m going to leave il pavesino behind
and carry on up the road to where we’re really going.
“Consonno e il paese piu piccolo ma piu bello del mondo”
Ahem, there’s a few letters missing, but basically,
“Consonno is the smallest but most beautiful country in the world”.
Country? Or village? Might be the most small and most beautiful village in the world.
Er. Anyway. It’s the smallest and most beautiful whatever-it-is.
I should probably warn you,
I spent precisely 8 months learning Italian about 20 years ago,
but am I going to let that stop me translating everything?
Absolutely not.
“A Consonno e sempre festa”
– “in Consonno, it’s always party time”, basically.
These rusting old signs pop up every few hundred metres along the approach to Consonno
blaring out exaggerated propaganda like the fossilised relics of a deposed regime.
(I’m not sure that’s the effect they were originally going for.)
So there’s some upside-down As there, masquerading as Vs,
but that would be “chi vive a Consonno campa… something”.
“Chi vive a Consonno campa di piu.”
So, whoever lives in Consonno... goes camping a lot?
I’ll be honest, that might not be quite the correct translation.
[Whoever lives in Consonno lives for longer.]
And finally – I think this is the last one anyway –
“qui Consonno tutto e meraviglioso”.
“Here in Consonno everything is marvellous”.
Well it’s quite a build-up, but we have now finally arrived in Consonno itself.
And right here we’re standing in the holiday camp parking lot,
but originally this would have been the centre of the old village
and you can still see the church of San Maurizio,
and the neighbouring chaplain’s house,
and… that’s it.
So what happened to the rest of the village? Where did it go?
Well let’s pick up the story where we left off in 1961.
When Count Mario Bagno discovered what was then the little hillside community of Consonno,
he liked it for two reasons.
Mi piace per due motivi. Uno...
I like it for two reasons.
1, there’s a lovely panoramic view of the Alps.
And b, none of the residents owns their home.
It all belongs to one real estate company.
Which means I can simply buy the lot and kick them out.
...e buttarli fuori.
And that’s exactly what he did.
Before the deal had even been completed,
the Count went ahead and started building the road up the hill
– because until then there hadn’t been one –
and then on the 8th January 1962 the purchase was finalised,
and for 22.5m Italian lire, the Count had bought himself the entire village.
And then almost immediately
he flattened it.
There’s a quote from one of the residents at the time
recalling that they hadn’t even finished moving out before the bulldozers moved in.
But nothing was going to stop Count Mario.
Homes were demolished, new roads were put in,
and a small hill next to the cemetery was detonated
just to improve the view of the Alps.
Concerns were raised about the environmental impact of such drastic development,
particularly after a landslide in 1966 temporarily blocked the access road.
But the Count ploughed on
and reassured everyone that he was still
planning to preserve the traditional agricultural focus of the community,
he just wanted to build a giant shopping and entertainment complex,
two hotels,
a casino, and a zoo.
A funfair, a bowling alley, an Egyptian sphinx, a bingo hall,
a medieval castle, a ballroom, a disco, a small pagoda with a fake cannon on top of it,
a swimming pool, tennis courts, football pitches, a mini-golf and some horse-riding facilities.
And if things went well,
then in a few years he might add a very modest,
scaled down,
so-small-you-would-hardly-notice-it,
motor racing circuit.
In the end about half of that had been built
when the Count flung open the doors
to what he called La Citta dei Balocchi – the City Of Toys.
But it was already plenty enough to bring in the pundits,
and for a few years Consonno was a genuine success,
attracting hoards of tourists from all over northern Italy
and seeing performances from some of the biggest Italian musical artists of the time.
It even became a popular spot for weddings
– not surprising really, it’s a lovely location,
you’ve got everything you need for a big party,
and there’s a church and a priest on site.
Turns out the Count knew what he was doing when he left those buildings still standing.
But it seems the novelty wore off pretty quickly.
By 1972, only five years after opening, numbers were already beginning to dwindle.
The resort struggled on for a few more years,
but then disaster struck.
In October 1976, mother nature took her terrible revenge.
Heavy rains caused another landslide,
and this time it was BIG.
The main access route was completely destroyed
and parts of it were simply washed away.
For Consonno it was, in a particularly literal way, the end of the road.
The road was eventually repaired.
It was too late for the resort,
but in a last desperate attempt to salvage something from the project,
the Count reopened part of the old Plaza Hotel as a retirement home in 1981.
Doesn’t seem like the best location to put your grandparents
(unless you really don’t get on with them)
but somehow it survived right up until about 2005.
And apparently at that point most of the buildings here were still in a decent state, albeit empty.
But shortly after the retirement home shut down,
and word got round that the buildings were now abandoned and unguarded,
an illegal rave was organised with over 1000 people attending.
It sounds amazing but unfortunately and predictably the place was completely trashed.
Since then, illegal raves have been clamped down on,
and the buildings remain private property
so technically you’re not supposed to go inside anything here.
Not that anyone is going to stop you, but it’s good to respect places like this -
take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints, you know the drill.
So what is the future for Consonno?
Count Mario was already in his 60s when it opened, and he’s now sadly long gone,
but the property is still owned by the Bagno family
and they don’t seem to be doing very much about it.
The only thing that I know has happened in the last couple of years
is that they’ve removed the bottom end of this ladder
that people had been using to climb up the tower.
A local group called Amici di Consonno (Friends of Consonno)
organise occasional events and festivals here,
just to bring a bit of life back to the place,
and there are occasional rumours that someone is going to buy the site for redevelopment.
And I guess if that ever happens
it’ll get flattened again.
If you’d like to visit Consonno, while it’s still here,
it’s an hour from Milan on the local train up to Calolziocorte
followed by a 90 minute hike.
Of course, if you’ve got a car you can just drive up the hill
but there’s a barrier about halfway along which is usually closed
so you will still have a bit of a walk.
The village is freely accessible,
but obviously anyone who goes there does so at their own risk. Don’t sue me.
And that’s it!
Thank you very much to Amici di Consonno for letting me
use the historic photos from their Facebook page,
thank you all for watching,
and I will see you soon.