Situated on the alluvial rise originated, in distant times, by the streams of Vignoi and Sant’Anna, closed to the north by the rocky crags of the Biaschina (living testimony of a gigantic scree slope), Giornico represents the junction of the Ticino plain with the more typically alpine landscape.

The first documents on Giornico date back to the first half of the 10th century, in Carolingian times. On the meaning of the name, one hypothesis holds that the place name has a Celtic basis: Juris, meaning ‘wooded mountain’. A recent study proposes a new thesis based on the history of the village in the medieval period. In it, the name Giornico would derive from ‘day’ with the addition of the suffix ‘ico’ meaning ‘place where the days of justice were held every year by the lords who controlled the territory’. Its particular geographic position and the constant attention of a strategic nature to which it was subjected for many centuries, with the aim of exercising vigilant control over the St Gotthard route, suggested to Stefano Franscini the image -which is the definition of a role- of ‘gateway to the Leventina’. But what characterises Giornico above all is the continuous intertwining of the natural element with the work of man: in fact, the inventory of environmental and cultural assets is extraordinarily rich to the point that the entire village constitutes a veritable museum. Giornico is a village unlike any other precisely because it possesses a greater amount of beauty. Suffice it to mention the Torre di Atto, linked to the donation of the feudal rights of the Tre Valli to the Canons of Milan Cathedral, the churches of San Nicola – an authentic and recognised jewel of Romanesque architecture -, Santa Maria del Castello, Casa Stanga (now home to the Leventina Ethnographic Museum), the two medieval humpback bridges connecting the island to the two banks of the Ticino, and the mysterious ruins of Castellaccio. Finally, not to be forgotten is the Monument of the Battle of Sassi Grossi, a testimony to the historical vicissitudes.