Osio Sopra

On the seventeenth and eighteenth of April 1911, on the border with Osio Sotto, the flying field of the Rasica was opened, one of the first in Italy. Airmen came to it from half of Europe, but the finest story is that of a local self-taught man, Stefano Minossi: on the twenty-fifth of April of that same year he took off in a biplane he had designed and built himself, and rose about two metres from the ground. The field was short-lived and was later replaced by the airport of Orio al Serio; in that same area, today, people fly model aircraft.

The Rasica takes its name from a sawmill, but before that, in 1469, there stood a two-wheeled mill drawing on the water of a canal. In 1872 a German entrepreneur bought the site and built a silk mill there, which in 1927 employed six hundred and eighty people; today it employs a score, and the oldest parts of the complex stand abandoned. The name of the village, on the other hand, comes from a Roman patrician family, the gens Otia, and in the documents of the ninth and tenth centuries it appears as Osio superiore.