Garlate

Garlate spent two centuries changing its borders. In 1809 it was annexed to Olginate and vanished from the maps; once a municipality again, in the twentieth century it swallowed Pescate in its turn, so that by 1931 it had more than one thousand eight hundred inhabitants, and it lost them again when Pescate became independent after 1951. Earlier still it had been far more important than that: until 1574 the village, then known as Corte Garlinda, was the head of the pieve that bore its name. In Roman times the via Spluga passed through, the road linking Milan to the Splügen pass, and of the old third-century bridge over the Adda only a few ruins survive.

The village monument is not a church but a factory. The silk mill built in 1841 passed from Gaetano Bruni to the Gnecchi family and in 1887 to the Abegg of Zurich; when the spinning work dried up in the early nineteen-thirties, the works carried on with rewinding and doubling until 1950. That year Carlo Job, then head of the Abegg group, set aside the wing that had housed the offices and the cocoon sorting to gather the machines and the memory of the trade: it was the first nucleus of the Silk Museum. The town hall, a short distance away, occupies the former Villa Abegg with its frescoed rooms.