Cernusco sul Naviglio

Until 1859 it was called Cernusco Asinario, and the reason is in its coat of arms. In 1849, at the Cascina Lupa, an urn was found with the ashes of a Roman, Caius Asinius, who died almost a century before Christ: from him the town's name is said to come, and that urn is drawn at the top of the civic shield. Below it, a wavy band is the Naviglio della Martesana, and a tower recalls the Della Torre, who made Cernusco a fief and a stronghold in their fight against the Visconti — a fight they lost. Three lines of history in a single coat of arms: a Roman urn, a canal, and the tower of a defeated family.

The canal that gives the town its name was finished by Leonardo da Vinci: the Martesana had been dug only as far as the Cassina de' Pòmm, and it was he who, in 1497, carried it into Milan by building locks. Over the water, the bridge of viale Assunta is of the fifteenth century, rebuilt after the plague and restored in the twentieth. In the eighteen hundreds the hamlet of Increa was detached and given to the new comune of Brugherio, which was then assembling itself out of pieces of its neighbours. The jewel is villa Alari, an eighteenth-century delight by the architect Giovanni Ruggeri for count Giacinto Alari, one of the finest examples of Lombard barocchetto, with frescoed interiors and Borroni's Triumph of Apollo: an archduke of Habsburg stayed there, and in the twentieth century it was turned into a psychiatric hospital. The title of city, on the other hand, is recent: the decree was signed by Sandro Pertini in 1985.