Parabiago

On the twenty-first of February 1339, beneath Parabiago, the army of Milan won the battle against Lodrisio Visconti, who had allied with the lord of Verona out of resentment at being excluded from the city's government; tradition says the outcome was decided by saint Ambrose, who appeared on horseback to help the Milanese. In his honour the church of Sant'Ambrogio della Vittoria was built, later rebuilt by the Cistercians in the early eighteenth century; today its bell tower has no bells, and popular legend claims Napoleon carried them off during the Italian campaign, but in fact they were given to the sanctuary of Saronno in 1798, when the order was suppressed. Eighty-two years before the battle, on the churchyard of Saints Gervasius and Protasius, the truce had been signed that spared Milan a civil war between the common people and the nobility.

That same church has a neoclassical facade designed by Giuseppe Piermarini, brought to Parabiago thanks to Giuseppe Maggiolini, the master of marquetry born in the town, who managed to bring him there. Another sanctuary, that of San Felice, had a square dome so imposing that it collapsed in 1950 and had to be rebuilt smaller. Then Parabiago became the town of footwear: the first shoe factory dates from 1899, and between the seventies and the nineties it was one of the shoemaking hubs of northern Italy. One of its hamlets, now called Villapia, was known until 1940 as Tiracoda, and changed its name in tribute to the residents who built its church with their own hands.