Noviglio

In a scattered municipality of rice fields and farmsteads, inside the Parco Agricolo Sud of Milan, stands the Kartell museum: founded in 1999 and reorganised in 2014, it displays more than a thousand creations by the designers of the furniture company that has its headquarters here. It is the archive of one of the firms that taught the world a chair could be made of plastic, and it sits among Noviglio, Mairano, Santa Corinna and Tainate, hamlets far apart from one another and each with its own church, which is the way these places record that they were separate villages for a long time.

Four thousand two hundred and thirty-seven inhabitants in the metropolitan city of Milan. The economy is still agricultural: rice, maize, wheat and cattle raised for meat and milk. The farmsteads — Conigo, Tavernasco, Conago, Domenegasco, Copiago — have kept their original structures, and with them the memory of the work of the farmhands and of the women who weeded the paddies. For years storks nested between April and August on the bell tower of the church of San Michele at Mairano. In 1630 the plague passed through, and decades of famine followed.