There are mountains you learn to recognise before you even know what they are really called. The Resegone is the first of them all, for anyone who grew up between Milan, the Brianza and the Lario: that jagged profile that closes the horizon to the north, with its row of teeth that seems cut out of cardboard.

Manzoni puts it in the second sentence of his novel and does something that is rarely noticed: instead of describing the mountain up close, he explains where you have to look at it from. From in front, for example from the walls of Milan facing north. Only from there, he writes, do its peaks in a row “make it look like a saw”.

It is the point from which everything else starts. The Resegone is a mountain that exists twice: as a silhouette seen from afar, which everyone recognises, and as a vertical place of 1,875 metres where you climb using your hands in the right spots. The two versions hardly resemble each other at all.

Resegone is the Italianisation of the Lombard resegún, big saw. The classic count speaks of nine points, and these are the ones that stand out from Lecco and from the Brianza when the light is raking.

On the ridge, however, the named peaks number more than a dozen, distributed along the roughly four kilometres that separate the Passata pass, to the south, from the Giuff pass, to the north. The highest is the Punta Cermenati, 1,875 metres, and around it stand the Pizzo Daina, the Torre di Valnegra, the Punta Stoppani, the Dente, the Cima Pozzi, the Punta Manzoni, the Pizzo Brumano, the Pizzo di Morterone. Nine are those you count from the valley, more than a dozen are those that have a name: the difference is entirely a matter of perspective.

It is worth dwelling on the names, because they tell a very specific Lecco story. Antonio Stoppani, born in Lecco in 1824, geologist and abbot, is the author of Il Bel Paese, the book that in 1876 taught half of Italy to look at its own mountains, and was one of the promoters of the Lecco section of the Alpine Club founded in 1874.

Mario Cermenati, also from Lecco, naturalist and historian of science, is the following generation. Manzoni had already done the rest. They are the three men who explained this mountain to Italy, and in some ways to the whole world too, and the mountain has kept them as place names.

The second name, Monte Serrada, has a disputed origin: some derive it from the fact that the massif closes in (serra) the surrounding valleys, others from the Spanish aserrada, sawn, a vivid reminder of almost two centuries of foreign domination. In both cases the meaning is the same: someone, looking at it, thought of a blade.

The answer is in the rock. The Resegone consists mainly of Dolomia Principale (Main Dolomite), a Upper Triassic formation, the same family of rocks that in the actual Dolomites produces spires and towers.

Here the effect is identical, on a reduced scale: the upper part is dolomitic, with pinnacles emerging from the pastures like teeth from a gum, while the lower part is covered by a large beech forest.

Towards Lecco the mountain drops away in steep ramparts and gullies, an almost uninterrupted wall from which the rock routes and the via ferratas branch off. Towards the east, on the side of the Valle Imagna and the Val Taleggio, everything softens into grassy ridges and mountain pastures.

This is why the same summit can be a climb for experienced hikers or a two-hour stroll, depending on the side from which you approach it. At sunset, when the light hits the dolomite edge-on, the grey turns to pink: it is the moment when the silhouette becomes recognisable even to those looking at it from the plain, fifty kilometres away.

On the lake side you start from Versasio, in Lecco, from the cable car car park at 610 metres. Trail 1 is the classic route: 1,265 metres of elevation gain, about three hours of climbing, difficulty EE, with some exposed passages and small rock steps in the final stretch. It is not a technically difficult route, it is only relatively long; it is worth bearing in mind that in summer the south-west slope is constantly exposed to the sun from ten in the morning onwards.

Those who want to shorten it take the cable car, in service since 1965, which carries you to the Piani d'Erna at 1,320 metres and cuts out the first hour and a half and more of woodland. The departure car park has paid parking and is the terminus of urban bus number 5, which comes from Lecco railway station. The lift is part of the Lombard local public transport, so the regional integrated tickets apply: a single ride costs 8 euros, the ten-ride carnet 73, a bicycle or dog 3 euros.

Until 24 October 2026 it opens at 8:30 on weekdays and closes at 17:30, with a break between 12:30 and 13:30; on weekends and holidays it starts at 8:00 and runs until 18:00. From 25 October the schedule is shortened by half an hour every day.

Along this side you meet the historic strongholds of the Lecco Resegone: the Rifugio Stoppani in the locality of Costa, at 890 metres, and higher up the Capanna Alpinisti Monzesi at 1,173 metres, just below the Passo del Fò, with the nearby Capanna Ghislandi. These are the places where you have a drink looking down at the lake, and they are also the reference points for finding your way in the tangle of trail markers that opens up just below the Piani d'Erna.

The easy route is on the other side. From Ballabio you take provincial road 63, fifteen kilometres of tight hairpins that climb to the Olino saddle, just under 1,200 metres, and descend to Morterone.

You park near the helicopter rescue pad, at 1,070 metres, take trail 16 to the Forbesette spring at 1,405, then trail 17 on a false flat through the woods to the Brumano saddle and the last slope. Eight hundred metres of elevation gain, two hours, difficulty E. It is the right climb for those who don't have skyrunner legs and still want the summit cross, and it is also the most frequented in winter with snowshoes, small crampons or ski-mountaineering skis, when conditions allow.

The road to Morterone is the only access to the village and is closed in case of snow or avalanche risk: it is the first thing to check before getting in the car.

That leaves the Bergamo gateways. From Brumano, nine hundred metres above sea level in the Valle Imagna, you reach the summit in two and a half hours by a trail that leaves the woods on gravelly ground and reaches the ridge just before the refuge. From Fuipiano you climb via the Costa del Palio, the long grassy back that divides the Val Taleggio from the Valle Imagna.

From Erve, above Calolziocorte, you gain the Passo del Fò and enter the circuit of the via ferratas. Anyone with a whole day and the wish to understand the mountain as a whole can walk the Anello del Resegone (Resegone Ring), which circles the massif touching all the slopes and culminates precisely at the Passo del Giuff, at 1,515 metres.

The Lecco side has been equipped for decades, and the via ferratas here have very different characters. The two most famous were built in 1981 by the Gruppo Alpinistico Gamma di Lecco, and both were refurbished in March 2022 with a 300,000-euro intervention.

The Gamma 1 leads to the top of the Pizzo d'Erna on ladders and chains, vertical in the first part and more of a scramble in the second, with the Lecco branch of the lake always beneath your feet. The Gamma 2, dedicated to Carlo Mauri, reaches the Dente and is a completely different story: grade TD, six hundred metres of elevation gain, four hours of climbing, a demanding chimney and no intermediate escape route, reserved for those who really frequent via ferratas.

The Silvano De Franco runs straight almost to the summit cross, while the equipped path of the Caminetto and the Canalone Bobbio serve mainly as descents for experienced hikers.

Almost opposite in character is the Ferrata del Centenario, which starts near the Passo del Fò and climbs a gully for just over a hundred and fifty metres of elevation gain, generously equipped with rungs and chains.

It is the classic first ferrata: short, never extreme, with a few vertical stretches that are enough to tell whether heights are for you. An error circulates about it that repeats from site to site, namely that it was opened in the 1970s for the centenary of the Lecco section of the CAI.

The correct date is 13 October 1963, the builders were members of the CAI of Calolziocorte, and the centenary being celebrated was that of the founding of the Club Alpino Italiano, born in 1863. In 2023 it turned sixty.

On these routes, checking beforehand is not a detail. The ramparts of the Resegone shed rocks, and over the last two years the Municipality of Lecco has signed several closure orders: the Gamma 2 was off limits for weeks in the summer of 2025 because of a dislodged piton, then again from 30 April to 8 June 2026 after a rockfall that had damaged the cable.

In August 2026 a storm damaged the pitons of both Gammas: the 2 was reopened on 19 August, while the 1 remains closed, because a lightning strike blew out a line of eight pitons and the stability of the rock needs to be checked.

Before putting your kit in the car it is best to check the orders of the Municipality of Lecco or ask at a refuge. For the rest the usual rules apply: certified equipment, helmet mandatory because the dolomite sheds stones, and no improvisation.

Morterone deserves a stop even without climbing to the top of the Resegone. According to Istat data updated to August 2026, thirty people live there, eighteen men and twelve women: it is the least populated municipality in Italy, and has been for decades, after a depopulation that in the 1930s started from four hundred residents.

What you don't expect is the art. Since the mid-1980s, on the initiative of the Associazione Culturale Amici di Morterone and around the reflection of the poet Carlo Invernizzi, the village has hosted an open-air contemporary art museum: dozens of works by Italian and European artists scattered among meadows, woods, house walls and roadsides, which can be visited independently with a map and the codes to scan in piazza della Chiesa.

From the same village starts the Sentiero dei Grandi Alberi (Trail of the Great Trees), a loop of about three hours maintained by ERSAF that crosses the Resegone Regional Forest among centuries-old and monumental beeches. The forest covers 690 hectares across the municipalities of Lecco, Morterone and Brumano and is divided into two sections, the peaks and the east slope on one side, the Costa del Palio with its mountain pasture on the other.

Since 2004 it has been a Special Protection Area of the Natura 2000 network. Chamois and roe deer reach good densities here, there are black grouse and rock partridge, and the golden eagle appears from time to time, flying in from the nearby Orobie. Those who set off at dawn have a good chance of crossing paths with some marvellous animal.

About fifteen metres below the cross, at 1,860 metres, is the Rifugio Luigi Azzoni. Its story begins in the early twentieth century with a small hut built by Giuseppe Vitari of Brumano as a shelter for goatherds and hunters, then bought and turned into a refuge by the engineer Enrico Daina and finally passed in 1923 to the Società Escursionisti Lecchesi.

On 30 August 1925 Cardinal Eugenio Tosi climbed all the way up here to bless the newly erected summit cross, which is still the one you touch today. In October 1944 the war swept away almost all the refuges of the Lecco area, this one included.

It was in fact rebuilt in its present form and inaugurated on 27 August 1950 under the name of Luigi Azzoni, the SEL treasurer who had made its reconstruction possible and who had died the year before. In the mid-1960s the Città di Lecco bivouac was added, a little below, always open in case of need.

Today the refuge is run by the mountain guide Maurizio Valsecchi, has about twenty beds and stays open every weekend of the year, every day in the height of summer. Half board is around fifty euros and it is best to phone beforehand, both to book and to be told what the mountain is like at that moment.

Sleeping there is the only way to see the panorama in the two short hours that matter: from dawn, with the plain under the fog, to sunset, when you can make out Monviso, Monte Rosa, the Matterhorn, the Bernina, the Grigne to the north and the dark line of the Apennines to the south.

Those same slopes have a harder memory. On 17 October 1943, at the Piani d'Erna, the partisan formation Carlo Pisacane, led by Gaetano Invernizzi, known as Bonfiglio, faced the German roundup in what has gone down in history as the battle of Erna, one of the first armed actions of the Resistance in the Lecco area. A memorial stone commemorates it a few minutes from the arrival of the cable car, and every October a wreath is laid there.

For those who live beneath the Resegone this is not a postcard mountain, it is a terrain of effort and competition. Two races say so. The Monza-Resegone was born on 9 November 1924 as the Autumn Tourist March of the Società Alpinisti Monzesi: teams leaving from the Arengario in Monza, crossing the Brianza at night and finishing uphill at the Capanna Alpinisti Monzesi.

It consists of forty-two kilometres, about 1,100 metres of elevation gain, teams of three who in the Classic format cover the entire distance together, joined since 2024 by a relay version in three legs. The 20 June 2026 edition was the sixty-fourth, with over five hundred starters.

The ResegUp is the modern, vertical version: twenty-four kilometres and more than 1,800 metres of positive elevation gain, from piazza Garibaldi in Lecco to the cross and back. On 6 June 2026 the fifteenth edition was run, with 1,200 bibs sold out in four days and the victory of Luca Del Pero in 2 hours, 14 minutes and 18 seconds. Keep that time in mind as you climb: it is your three-hour itinerary covered both up and down.

The full season runs from May to October, when the trails are clear and the refuges open continuously. September and October are probably the best months: the air dries out, the summer haze disappears and the view from the summit really reaches as far as the guidebooks say.

In winter the mountain changes trade, the summit ridge freezes and the climb becomes terrain for crampons and experience, even on the easy Morterone side.

Three things make the difference more than any others. Water: on the Lecco side there are no reliable springs along the climb, you fill up at the refuges and in summer you need at least two litres each.

Timing: on the south and west side you either start early or you cook, and those counting on the cable car must remember that the last descent is before sunset. And footwear, because the last metres before the ridge are on rock polished by the passage of generations, which is slippery when damp.

From Lake Como you reach Lecco in less than an hour by car and in about an hour by train, bearing in mind that on the Como-Lecco line direct trains are few and it is often better to change at Molteno. The most beautiful return, however, is not by car: it is stopping on the lakefront at sunset and looking up. After having been there, that row of teeth stops being a profile and becomes a map.

There is the gully you came out of, there the ridge you walked, there the dot of the refuge. It is the reason why this mountain, less than two thousand metres high and surrounded by giants, remains the most important of all for those who look at it every day.