Castello di Brianza

Castello di Brianza is a scattered municipality: it has no real main centre, and its name comes not from a village but from a building. It is the castle of Brianzola, reworked several times over the centuries, which tradition holds belonged to queen Theodolinda. The municipality, by contrast, is recent: it was born in 1928 from the merger of Brianzola and Cologna, two municipalities that until then were separate. Cologna, in the Middle Ages, passed between the greatest hands: granted by Otto I to the bishops of Bergamo, it was later entrusted by Conrad the Salic to the archbishop of Milan Ariberto da Intimiano, who in 1035 gave it to the monastery of San Dionigi — the same one to which neighbouring Barzago owes its first mention. In 1491 the fief passed from the Milanese monks to the Missaglia.

Of the castle of Brianzola the fifteenth-century building remains, which everyone calls Theodolinda's castle even though the Lombard queen lived eight hundred years earlier. The other things the village keeps tell a more recent and truer story: Villa Aureggi, where Vincenzo Monti often stayed; the Insiraga farmstead; the former silk mill, evidence of the work that fed the Brianza for generations; and the municipal wash-house, the place where the village really met. The parish church of San Lorenzo Martire dates from 1938, and there is a subsidiary one, also dedicated to San Lorenzo, at Brianzola.