Garbagnate Milanese

The name still bears the mark of the fields: the root Garben, of Celtic origin, means sheaf of wheat, and the ending -ate means place. In Roman times it was called Garbaniatum and lay on the road linking Milan to Lugano by way of Varese. The title of city came late, in 1985, but Garbagnate's most intense chapter begins in the nineteen-twenties, when between 1923 and 1930 a huge sanatorium hospital was built in the Groane woods, seventy-five thousand square metres of pavilions with wide windows and terraces, meant to treat the tuberculosis that then struck the poorer classes hard: the air of the woods, it was believed, was part of the cure.

It was precisely that hospital that paid the heaviest price of the war. In the final months of the occupation a group of doctors and nurses secretly backed the local partisans, and on the fourth of November 1944 Nazis and fascists raided the building, deporting much of the medical staff to concentration camps: few came back. In 1955 the hospital was named after Guido Salvini, one of the doctors who died in that deportation, and in 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Liberation, a monument was dedicated to them. Today the town, distinct from the built-up area of Bollate and Arese, keeps beside the former hospital a protected heronry, a colony of herons grown up right in the grounds of the complex, and belongs to the Groane park along with twenty-seven other municipalities.