Garbagnate Monastero

On the hill, standing alone above the old fields, is the church of San Martino: a single nave, a small bell tower, the middle of the twelfth century, when it was the centre of the Humiliati order who worked between Brongio and Gaesso. In 1630, the year of the plague, it was turned into a lazaretto, and it has kept its dead ever since: on the outer right flank, in a niche high on the wall, lie the bones of the plague victims who died there. In the restoration of 1960 those that had meanwhile scattered around the area were put back too. The church is still consecrated, and every year on the eleventh of November, Saint Martin's day, people go there for mass.

The village's name comes from the Latin garbus, "grassy field"; the "Monastero" is less certain. In 1280 a monastery is recorded on the land, thought to have stood near the oratory of Santi Nazaro e Celso, but many documents show that Garbagnate was for a long time an estate belonging to a Milanese monastery: perhaps the name recalls not a convent that was here, but an owner who was elsewhere. The oratory, Romanesque of the eleventh century, stands over a Lombard one and held the burial of a warrior; in the restoration of 1891 Roman rock-cut tombs came to light and a barbarian grave of the sixth or seventh century with a bronze fibula, two iron knives and a coin. Today it is a national monument.