Buccinasco

The name comes from the Latin bucina, a channel or conduit, with a suffix of Ligurian origin: an old way of saying that water was everywhere here, among canals and springs, and it still is. Until the mid-twentieth century Buccinasco was not one village but three separate farming hamlets, Buccinasco Castello, Romano Banco and Gudo Gambaredo, joined under the same name in 1841 but each growing largely on its own for a long time: around the Visconti castle from the late fourteenth century, where Ludovico il Moro is documented as staying in 1463, and around the farmsteads that still dot the Parco Agricolo Sud Milano. Then, from the nineteen-sixties, a massive wave of immigration made Romano Banco grow until it became the town's real centre, relegating the old Buccinasco Castello to a mere hamlet.

Among the surviving farmsteads, the Cascinazza is today a Benedictine monastery of fifteen monks tied to Comunione e Liberazione, where they brew the first artisan abbey beer ever made in Italy, following the tradition learned from their Belgian brothers. Seven kilometres from Milan, set within the residential fabric of the hinterland, the town gave its name, quite unintentionally, to a line in the film Benvenuti al Nord, and provided the setting for Lo spietato. Beneath the western ring road, artificial lakes such as Lake Santa Maria offer canoeing and summer swimming to anyone looking for a patch of countryside a stone's throw from the metropolis.