Cucciago

In the centre there is a tile with two cats carved on it. It recalls the nickname the people of neighbouring villages are said to have given the inhabitants, scusciagatt, that is cat-squashers, from which popular tradition derives the name of the municipality. Except that it is the other way round: Cucciago is the normal evolution of the medieval Cutiacum, and of that nickname no trace remains in any written source; if anything it would be the nickname that was born from the place name. The village, in short, has set up in its square a monument to a mistaken etymology.

The real name is genuinely old. In the wall of the little church of San Vincenzo, swallowed inside eighteenth-century buildings, there survives a bell tower of the twelfth century, and under the plaster fragments of frescoes of the year one thousand have appeared, contemporary with those of the basilica of Galliano at Cantù. The tower of the Alciati, birthplace of Saint Arialdo, is what remains of the castle mentioned in a parchment of 1147. Today Cucciago has three thousand four hundred and fifty inhabitants in the province of Como, on a long hill above the valley of the Seveso.