Casatenovo

Casatenovo is the Casate Nuovo that set itself apart from a Casate Vecchio, and it carries the surname of the Casati, who enlarged the castle between the tenth and eleventh centuries. The arms come from them too: the town took the family shield, a roofed tower between two tresses bent into a circle and crossed at the base, with the colours swapped, a gold tower on red instead of red on silver. The first mention goes back to 867, in the time of Charles the Bald, though archive evidence of a settlement is no earlier than 1110.

In 1692 the fief passed to marquis Giulio Casati, who with his descendants held it through the eighteenth century in non-feudal form. At the Porrinetti farmstead a fourth-century funerary cippus came to light, inscribed for Lucillio Domestico Valeriano of the college of smiths and centenarii. Two old churches survive: Santa Margherita, rebuilt in the fifteenth century, says an inscription kept inside, with late Gothic frescoes still unattributed and the months of the year painted in monochrome along the base; and Santa Giustina, wanted by the Casati, whose arms appear on the Romanesque bell tower: little of the original fabric is left after a seventeenth-century restoration that erased most frescoes.