Gaggiano

Gaggiano lies on the Naviglio Grande southwest of Milan, inside the southern agricultural park. Thirteenth-century chroniclers gave the canal the village's name: navigium de Gazano, after the older form of the toponym. That same form explains the arms, a magpie perched on a flowering rose branch: the bird echoes Gazano, the branch comes from the Varesi of Rosate. Two explanations circulate: a popular legend has magpies once plentiful here, though the word may also come from the Lombardic gehage, a fenced wood, the village having stood at a wood's edge.

At Barate, on the Meraviglia farmstead, Pope Francis's great-grandfather Pietro Giovanni Gogna was born on 29 April 1849 and baptised next day in the church of Sant'Andrea Apostolo; his daughter Maria later emigrated to Argentina. By the canal bridge stands the old parish church of Sant'Invenzio, where in 1620 the roof fell in along its whole length in broad daylight, during rebuilding work, without killing anyone, leaving untouched only the fifteenth-century fresco of the Madonna and Child, held miraculous ever since.