Merate

The name first turns up in a document of 926, though people lived here in Roman times, when the via Spluga crossed the area on its way from Milan to the pass of the same name. Merate was later a fief of Ariberto da Intimiano, who handed it to the Milanese monastery of San Dionigi.

A diploma issued at Roncaglia in 1158 confirmed the abbey's hold on the castle and ordered the local men to swear loyalty to the abbot and stop electing representatives of their own: the ban proves they had been doing it, which is why Merate counts among the first free communes of Brianza. It belonged for centuries to the pieve of Brivio, then outgrew its head town and took its place. In the school founded by the Riva couple and later run by the Somascan fathers, Alessandro Manzoni studied as a boy; it took his name after his death. In the nineteen-twenties the Brera observatory, troubled by the lights of Milan, moved its observing work here.