Calco

Three explanations circulate for the name of Calco, and two of them bring in Greece. The first rests on Strabo, according to whom the Romans, to repopulate the banks of the Adda after driving out the Insubres, deported many Greeks here: some came from the island of Chalki, in the Aegean, and are said to have given the place the name of the homeland they had lost and which it resembled. The second holds the name to be Celtic, from the word meaning lime or limestone boulder. The third tells of a Greek warrior, Calcos, who is said to have been given the village as a reward for saving the wife of the Lombard king Romuald.

What is certain is that the village is old. A tenth-century parchment carries the signature of an inhabitant of Calco, and in a deed of 975 a certain Umbertus still declares himself to be under Lombard law, some two hundred years after the Frankish conquest. At Arlate, the other centre of the comune, there was a convent of Cluniac nuns which owned land, mills and souls, first named in a charter of 1162. In 1428 the Adda became a state border between the Duchy of Milan and the Republic of Venice, and the castle of Calco served as a refuge for Francesco Sforza.