Bollate

Bollate has two etymologies, and both describe a landscape that is still there. The first takes it from Celtic beola, birch: the birches are at Castellazzo, where the ferretto soil of the Groane lets a mountain species grow down on the plain. The second from Latin bula, pool: Bollate sits on the line of the springs, and has always had fontanili in numbers. The Roman name was Bollatum, and the road from Milan to Lugano by way of Varese ran through. The oldest document to write Bolate is of 1039, and it is the gift of a piece of land to the church of San Martino, who is still the patron.

Then there is the story nobody tells: the pieve of Bollate sided with Barbarossa against Milan, and Ambrogio da Bollate led his men at porta Vercellina and died there, in 1161; fifteen years later the people of Bollate had changed flag, and at Legnano, in 1176, they were fighting alongside the Milanese. The town had walls then and two castles, one of them on the Pudiga, which today runs culverted under the squares. In the fifteen-eighties the village ended up painted, under the name Bola, on the map of the Duchy of Milan in the popes' Gallery of Maps. At Castellazzo is the little Lombard Versailles: villa Arconati, an eighteenth-century delight with frescoed halls, exedrae and green theatres, come back to life for visits and a summer festival of concerts in the park. The rest is plain north-west Milan, the Groane park, the farm courtyards swallowed by the town. And a last oddity: the prison strays over into Baranzate, which in 2004 went back to being a comune of its own; but for everyone it is still the Bollate prison.