Turate

Turate was Turatum to the Romans, on the road that joined Mediolanum to Luganum through Varisium. As Thurao it reappears in a donation of 712, when the Lombard king Liutprand gave the land to the monastery of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro in Pavia. In the fourteenth century «el locho da Turà» was among the places of the Appiano district bound to repair its stretch of the strata da Bolà. The arms, blue with six silver stars set three, two and one, are already in Marco Cremosano's seventeenth-century armorial.

The fief went to the Caimi, granted by Philip IV in 1623; they held their rights until 1785, when the last male heir died and Turate returned to the state domain. Two of their houses remain: Palazzo Ala Ponzone, baroque, built for the Caimi, given to the parish in the twentieth century and now the town hall, and the villa later called Casa Militare Umberto I, bought late in the nineteenth century by three local men as a home for veterans of the national wars, now with a military museum.