Lambrugo

In 1527 Gian Giacomo Medici, brother of the future pope Pius IV and maternal uncle of Saint Charles Borromeo, seized the castle of Lambrugo and devastated the Benedictine monastery of the enclosed nuns, burning its entire archive in reprisal: which is why so little is known of the village's oldest history. Half a century later, in 1574, it was Saint Charles Borromeo himself who came here on pastoral visit, and proposed that those same nuns move to Milan. The nuns said no and stayed. The monastery, founded in the middle of the eleventh century by a branch of the Carcano who had also built the castle, lasted until 1798, when the Cisalpine Republic suppressed it and Napoleonic soldiers sacked it.

The buildings were sold off piece by piece to the local people, and in the former convent one of the district's first silk mills was set up: the ruined monastery ended by giving the village work. The name, meanwhile, says where the place is: from the Celtic Lamber, the Lambro, and bruig, village — the village by the Lambro, which indeed crosses the territory inside the regional park of its own valley. For centuries Lambrugo depended on the provostry of Lurago d'Erba, and became an independent parish only in 1902; in 2025 a merger of the two municipalities was discussed again, but the referendum went against it. During the Second World War the resistance operated here under the partisan Giancarlo Puecher Passavalli, gold medal for military valour.