Ozzero

The comune's coat of arms is not the comune's: it is that of a family which had taken its name from the village. The da Oxero, or Ozero, were a Lombard house allied with the Torriani in the fight against the Visconti, and their arms are on page two hundred and sixty-two of the Stemmario Trivulziano; the comune took them over exactly as they were. In the medieval rural comune the podestà was a member of that family or his delegate, and about a century later the appointment of the local podestà became a right exercised in turn, a year each. The first document that names the common goods of Ozzero is of 1156, and in the map of the Duchy of Milan painted in 1581 for the Vatican gallery of maps the village appears as Ozeno.

The territory is small but full of water: the Rile, the Gambarera, the Sombo, and above all the Naviglio di Bereguardo, dug in the late Middle Ages, which brings the water of the Ticino this far by way of the Naviglio Grande; before those canals the village had spring-fed streams of its own. At the end of the thirteenth century there were three sacred buildings on this ground, and one of them, the oratory of Santa Maria, stood by the farmstead of Santa Maria del Bosco: the Ticino came up to there, and there were a landing and the salt ferry. During the Risorgimento Ozzero had to garrison the Naviglio di Bereguardo, which after the battle of Magenta was the Austrians' way out, and at the Five Days of Milan it sent reinforcements and bought weapons for the Milanese. With the unification of Italy the comune went back from the province of Pavia to that of Milan.