Castelnuovo Bozzente

Castelnuovo Bozzente has 889 inhabitants on a plateau inside the pine forest park of Appiano Gentile and Tradate, where among the farmsteads and the woods there are still the roccoli, the old posts for catching birds. The stream that gives it its second name, the Bozzente, rises from a hill a short way from the Swiss border. The village already appears in the statutes of the waters and roads of the Milan countryside of 1346, where "el locho da Castello Novo" is among those that have to keep a stretch of road in order.

Then a complicated story of identity begins. Until 1863 it was simply Castelnuovo; then it became Castelnuovo Bazente, because that was another name of the same stream, and only in 1910 did it take the name it has now. Meanwhile Napoleon, by a decree of 1807, had annexed it to Binago, and it took the Restoration to set it back on its feet. In 1928 a royal decree wiped it out again, merging it with Beregazzo con Figliaro into a brand new comune called Mirabello Comasco: to get itself, and its own name, back, the village had to wait until 1948.