Proserpio

Proserpio has 892 inhabitants on a Brianza plateau between four hundred and five hundred metres, formed by the glacier that came down towards Monza: in the fields you still find the trovanti, the erratic boulders of granite and serpentine that the ice carried down here from the Val Masino and the Val Malenco. The name makes one think at once of Proserpina, and in the nineteenth century there were those who explained it that way, but the old documents say otherwise: in the thirteenth century the village is Proxervi, in the fifteenth Proxerbi. More probably, then, it was the estate of a Roman family, the Servii, or else the land assigned to the servants.

A great deal is known about this small village, because a great deal was written down. In 1630, when the plague of the Landsknechts reached up here as well, the curate don Carlo Cancio kept a diary of the contagion from May to October, noting the names of the sick, those of the dead and where they were buried. In 1751, answering the questions of Maria Theresa's land survey, the comune declared 292 inhabitants, taxes too high and little work: many had to go to the neighbouring provinces to keep their families. And in 1779 the village went to law against a landowner over the water of the Rogoré spring, lost, and had to build an aqueduct to bring water to two public fountains.