Montevecchia

The hill of Montevecchia has always been a lookout. At the end of the nineteen-seventies two camps were found in the park: one of Neanderthal man, dated to sixty thousand years ago, and one of Homo sapiens at thirty-two thousand — among the oldest settlements in Lombardy. In Roman times there was a fort on the summit with more than eight hundred metres of walls, where the sanctuary stands today, and from it comes the etymology most often told, Mons Vigiliae, "mount of the lookouts", coarsened into Montaveggia and only adapted to Montevecchia after 1875. Scholars, though, lean towards a Celtic origin, a root that indicated sheep, lambs or deer. Today, a few metres from the sanctuary, stand the aerials that relay the local radio stations of the Brianza: the hill is still keeping watch.

The church on the summit, of Lombard origin, burnt down in 1570 "through the negligence of the parish priest", as the records of Saint Charles Borromeo's visitation noted; for nearly a century mass was said in the chapel of San Bernardo, until in 1630 the sanctuary was rebuilt, smaller than it is now. Inside there are frescoes by Andrea Appiani, in poor condition, and a Beheading of the Baptist attributed to Giulio Campi. The hill has a climate of its own too: at the top it is some two degrees cooler in summer and two warmer in winter than the villages below, and on the southern slope vines and aromatic herbs grow. The fief was bought in 1740 by the Agnesi, the Milanese family of Maria Gaetana, the mathematician: their summer villa, with its Italian garden, is still in the village.