Mediglia

Mediglia is a scattered comune: the town hall stands not in any place of that name but at Triginto, and the territory is a string of hamlets and farmsteads — Bustighera, Mombretto, Robbiano, San Martino Olearo, Vigliano, Bettolino — each grown around a church or a farm courtyard. Before Napoleon seven separate comuni stood on this same ground: the Napoleonic years merged them in two rounds, the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia handed each its independence back, and the mergers turned final only later in the nineteenth century.

That scattering shows in the number of parishes, five, three of them historic. The arms explain it: a silver mitre on a blue field, set there for the many churches and the lands that religious orders from Milan owned around here. The clearest case is San Martino Olearo, where the houses beside the church were called la Fabbrica, most likely because they belonged to the Veneranda Fabbrica of Milan Cathedral.