Bernate Ticino

In 1186 a pope took personal charge of the church of his own village. Uberto Crivelli, raised to the throne with the name of Urban III, belonged to the family that held the fiefs here; on the twenty-fifth of November that year, by a bull, he noted that the church of San Giorgio at Bernate had been founded on his father's land but was without goods, and assigned to it the properties bought from the nuns of Caronno and from the monks of San Vincenzo, leaving out only the harbour and the gravel of the Ticino. With that endowment he founded beside the church a college of regular canons under the rule of Saint Augustine.

The village is cut in two by the Naviglio Grande, and the two halves are held together by a seventeenth-century bridge: to the west the old centre and the wood that runs on to the Ticino park, to the east the more built-up part. Until 1862 it was called simply Bernate. In 1978 the village ended up in Ermanno Olmi's The Tree of Wooden Clogs: in a shot along the Naviglio the dome of the parish church and the medieval bell tower are recognisable. Three thousand and seventy-one inhabitants west of Milan.