Airuno

Four explanations circulate about the name of Airuno, and all of them are fine ones. There is the heron, king of the marsh that covered the plain of the Adda, and in certain documents of the archbishopric of Milan of 1574 the village is written precisely Airone. There is the badger, from the Gaulish eburus, and along the Adda there remains a place called i tas in dialect. There is the Celtic, where aan is place and run is secret: hidden place, which describes well a settlement sheltered behind the hill of the Rocca. And there are the alirune, the women who followed the army of the Goths carrying amulets carved with runes. Philology, however, cools everything down: a Latin will of 960 already writes Ayruno, and the heron becomes the least likely explanation.

That will belongs to a Lombard nobleman, Alcherio, who lived in the Rocca: a Roman watchtower the Lombards had turned into a castle. It was the base of Francesco Sforza in the war for the Colle di Brianza, and where it stood there is now the sanctuary of the Madonna della Rocchetta, with an eighteenth-century holy staircase. In 1652 the Spanish governor granted Airuno the right to buy itself out of enfeoffment. Two thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine inhabitants in the province of Lecco.