Carugo

The village's origins and its name, probably Celtic, are both uncertain. The name first appears in a parchment of 892, among the judges named by Maginfredo, count of Milan, for a case over a division of territory: one Stachelberto, judge of Curugo. The same year brings the first record of the castle, which in 1222 took in nobles fleeing Milan with archbishop Enrico da Settala; Milan's podestà Ardigotto Marcellino sent troops and razed it. The Carugo family took its name from it; the town's arms still carry a red three-towered castle between three blue bees.

On the hill facing Mariano Comense, on the old road from Mediolanum to Comum, stood the castrum of Gattedo, where Catharism took root in the twelfth century: within its walls were buried Nazario and Desiderio, the last Cathar bishops of the Concorezzo church in Lombardy. Innocent IV ordered it destroyed, said also to end the local cult of their remains; the order spared the church of San Martino and its eleventh-century frescoes, among them the supposed bilocation of Saint Ambrose, the oldest image of the saint in Brianza and around Lake Como.