Colle Brianza

Colle Brianza was born on 5 February 1928 by putting together three comuni: Cagliano, Nava and Ravellino, which until 1863 was called Tegnone. And it is from Tegnone that Giuseppe Ripamonti came, the priest and historian who was the chronicler of the Milan plague of 1630 and who, forgotten for almost two centuries, was read again in the nineteenth: his pages were the main historical source of The Betrothed. On the coat of arms the comet stands for him; the castle stands for Nava, where traces of paintings of the Giottesque school were found; the fountain for the sulphurous spring of Cagliano, which here they call la Pirenta.

The other thing the village has always had is a bell. The Campanone di Brianza is a square-plan tower, twenty-three metres high, built in the communal age on top of an earlier signal tower: when a foreign army came it was rung without stopping, and the sound meant one thing only, take refuge on Monte San Genesio. Then it collapsed, was rebuilt in the nineteenth century and restored in the nineteen-sixties. On that mountain, where a chapel is recorded as early as the tenth century, a hermitage was built in 1591.