Pioltello

Pioltello has the shape it has because of its history: a long narrow strip running north to south, because the comune was born on the first of January 1870 from the fusion of two villages independent until then, Pioltello and Limito, and the farmland between them filled up afterwards, with the Seggiano quarter. The year before, they had thought big — a Greater Pioltello taking in Rodano, Rovagnasco, Briavacca and even Segrate — but the villages said no. The first document naming Pioltello, still in the form Plautellum, is of 1020, and Limito appears in the same source a few years later: since then both have been documented without a break. Under Seggiano, meanwhile, a small necropolis of the third century AD has come to light.

Since 1780, every twenty-five years, without missing a turn, Pioltello Vecchia has held its Marian Jubilee: a feast that comes round once in a generation. And every Good Friday, at Seggiano, out comes the procession of Lu Signuri di li Fasci, brought here by the community that arrived from Pietraperzia, in the province of Enna: a Sicilian Holy Week in the Milanese hinterland. Today one resident in four is foreign, and in the rione Satellite three children in ten in the infant and primary schools come from elsewhere; the town answered with an intercultural council, one of the few attempts in the area to keep a conversation open. Pioltello calls itself the town of the three parks — the Cascine, Trenzanesio with its villa Invernizzi, and the Besozza wood, where an urban forest is growing — and Milan is twelve minutes away by train.