Consonno: the 'City of Toys' that never woke up

Consonno is one of the strangest ruins in Italy: a village on a hill above Lake Lecco that was demolished and rebuilt as a billionaire’s fantasy resort, complete with a minaret, a Chinese pagoda and a casino. It opened to great fanfare in the 1970s, and then a landslide cut the road, the visitors stopped coming, and the whole thing was left to rot.

A village demolished for a dream

Consonno was an old hill village in the province of Lecco, in Lombardy, with a church and a few dozen families. In the 1960s it caught the eye of Mario Bagno, a building entrepreneur who saw in its position above the lake the makings of a grand leisure resort. He bought up the village, demolished much of it, and began to build something entirely new.

Bagno’s plan was extraordinary. He built a complex of hotels, restaurants, a casino and a shopping arcade, decorated with a minaret, a pagoda and other exotic flourishes, and called it the ‘City of Toys’. It was a playground for the wealthy, a place of nightclubs and bright lights on a hill in the Italian countryside.

The road that disappeared

For a few years the City of Toys thrived, drawing celebrities and crowds from Milan and beyond. But the hill was unstable, and in 1976 and 1977 landslides struck. The road up to Consonno was destroyed, and with it the resort’s only practical connection to the outside world. Without visitors, the businesses closed, and the buildings were abandoned.

Nobody rebuilt the road, and nobody revived the resort. The village that had been demolished was gone, and the fantasy that replaced it was now empty. The church of San Maurizio, one of the few old buildings left standing, kept its place among the ruins, a small, real thing surrounded by the wreckage of an enormous idea.

A ruin on a hill

Consonno today is a ghost resort, its buildings collapsing and its exotic decorations fading. The minaret still stands, the arcades are empty, and the whole hilltop has the air of a place that was left mid-party. It is one of the most photographed abandoned sites in northern Italy, and a favourite of urban explorers.

It is a very Italian kind of ruin: not a victim of war or industry, but of ambition, geology and money that ran out. Like Craco further south, it is a place where the ground itself decided the future, and where a grand idea was left standing long after everyone had gone home.

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Related places

If this one stayed with you, these entries sit in the same corner of the archive:

• Craco: the Italian hill town abandoned to the earth — Italy
• Nara Dreamland: the Japanese park that copied Disneyland — Japan
• Barmaz: the Alpine hamlet that emptied in a single winter — Italy