Gudo Visconti

Of the Visconti castle at Gudo almost nothing is left: a few pieces of wall that have ended up inside the structure of a trattoria, which stands opposite the town hall and is built on the perimeter of part of the walls of the old medieval fort. The village belonged to the Visconti until 1498, and from them it took its second name; on the map of 1581 that represents the Duchy of Milan in the Gallery of the Vatican Palaces it appears instead as «Guoi». In the Napoleonic age it was annexed first to Zelo Surrigone and then to Rosate, and both times only briefly.

The coat of arms, granted in 1977, seems written rather than drawn. There is the Visconti serpent, but all the rest is an argument: the star is «the aspiration to lofty things», the crescent «the hope of economic growth», and an armoured arm with the hand pointing at the star is the exhortation to aim high; even the tinctures, the blue and the green, wish for firmness, glory and honour. The church of Santi Quirico e Giulitta is fifteenth-century in origin, and the name of Pellegrino Tibaldi has been put forward for the design of the façade; beside it, a fresco of popular tradition bears the date 1668.