Corsico

Corsico was born on the water, and almost at the same moment: the village takes shape around the twelve hundreds, and towards 1259 Martino della Torre begins to have the Naviglio Grande dug, and it runs straight through. Along its banks, for centuries afterwards, would pass the barges of sand and goods heading for the Darsena. The Torriani lost Milan at Desio and the family estate went to the Visconti; here too Niccolò Piccinino had his villa, the condottiero who fought for Filippo Maria Visconti. In 1525 the Opera Pia Vimercati was founded at Corsico, to distribute bread to poor families.

And here something happened that almost nobody knows. On the second of November 1584 Carlo Borromeo, archbishop of Milan, was coming back from a pastoral visit to Lake Maggiore; he stepped off the Barchett di Boffalora and stopped in the Guardia di Sotto district. They carried him to Milan on a litter, and he died the next day. On the spot where he stopped a shrine was raised: today, together with the little church beside it, it stands wholly abandoned. Of the old village there remain the Lombard courtyards — the curt — and the parish church of Saints Peter and Paul, with the eating houses that taste of an urban riviera. Today Corsico is a dense, multi-ethnic belt town, and the canal is still the drawing room: by the cycle path you are twenty minutes from the bars of Milan or, going the other way, out in the fields of Gaggiano.