Santa Maria Hoè

Until 1757 the village was called simply Hoè, and nobody quite knows what it means: a charter of 1088 has it as Ohe, then Ho for two centuries. The commonest explanation makes it Germanic, from hohe, «high», by way of an extinct patrician family — except that no Germanic peoples are attested on the Brianza hill. More probably it comes from the Latin vadum, the ford. The full name has had a restless life too: in 1928 the annexation of Rovagnate and Perego turned it into Santa Maria di Rovagnate, then the merger was undone, and in 1961 the village counted a quarter of the inhabitants it had had ten years earlier.

The rest was the work of the Servite friars, who had a convent here: in 1456 they had water mills built, and later promoted the weekly market for silk cocoons and the Addolorata livestock fair. And in this village of few houses Giuseppe Di Stefano chose to be buried, the Sicilian tenor who decided to live his last years here.