Mairago

Here, on 25 September 1773, Agostino Bassi was born. His father, a rich landowner, wanted him to be an official of the Habsburg empire and had him study law at Pavia; he, meanwhile, was attending the courses of Volta, Scarpa, Rasori and Spallanzani. The work of his life began in 1807 and lasted twenty-five years: the calcino, or moscardino, the disease that was destroying the silkworm farms. To find out whether it passed through the air he hung healthy silkworms at different heights inside a chimney, and only those in contact with the sick ones fell ill. From 1826 he used the microscope and found the agent: a parasitic fungus, which today bears his name, Beauveria bassiana. In 1835 he proved that the disease is caused by a microscopic parasite transmitted by contact and by infected food; in 1844, in Del contagio in generale, he went further, arguing that all contagious diseases, of animals and of plants, have parasitic causes and not miasmas nor spontaneous generation. He anticipated germ theory by decades: Pasteur kept his portrait in his office beside that of Spallanzani. The comune named one of its main streets after him, after his death.

The village is probably of Roman origin, in the twelfth century it belonged to the bishops of Lodi, and as feudal lords it had the signori di Salerano, the Simonetta, the Talenti from 1480 and finally the Vaini from 1703. In the Napoleonic period Grazzanello was aggregated to it, which with the Lombardo-Veneto kingdom became autonomous again and was definitively reunited in 1869; today cascina Grazzanello is an ecomuseum made of rural buildings, with a former cowshed holding two hundred and fifty farm tools, a former stable and a water mill with stone grindstones, already recorded in the Theresian land register of 1723 as a «rice husker and mill». Mairago is also the seat of the Lodi astronomical observatory, open to the public: under its dome there are a reflecting telescope of thirty centimetres, an apochromatic refractor of ten and one dedicated to the Sun.