Lurago Marinone

The coat of arms of Lurago Marinone tells the village in three figures. There is a castle, the one that stood on the hilltop and that the Milanese are said to have destroyed in 1284 — the report cannot be checked, but the place is still called Castell, and today it holds the nineteenth-century Villa Adele, seat of the municipality. There is a greyhound, the badge of the Marinoni, the family from which the village took the second half of its name. And there is, in the chief, the gold and black chequy of the Litta, who held the fief and the palace here. In the statutes of the waters and roads of the county of Milan of 1346 the village appears as "el locho di Luyrà d'i Marinoni", among the places of the pieve of Appiano bound to maintain the road.

The oldest thing, though, is the old church of San Giorgio, which goes back in part to the seventh century and is built over a pagan temple. Outside it, excavations have brought to light rock-cut tombs, graves, Roman objects of the first century BC and a block of stone carved with human features supposed to date from more than two thousand years before Christ. Inside there are frescoes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with Urban V, a Crucifixion and a Christ Pantocrator. The new parish church, also of San Giorgio, was ordered in 1574 by Saint Charles Borromeo on pastoral visit and finished only at the end of the seventeenth century; since 1681 a side chapel has held the remains of the early Christian martyr Saint Valentine, brought here from the Roman catacombs of Priscilla.