Rescaldina

The name has two explanations. Popular usage pulls it from riscalda, «it warms», as if the place were hotter than the rest; scholars prefer a compound of the early Middle Ages, from Latin robur, oak, and Lombardic scalta, a stand of trees: an oak wood. The wood was real, and Cistercian monks probably set up the first permanent farm here, the grangia, out of which Rescalda and Rescaldina grew.

At Rescalda the villagers were refused a parish of their own and answered by raising an endowment to keep a priest: it came in 1608, and with it the right to elect their parson, held until the Second Vatican Council. The last was elected in 1959, in one of the final two parishes of the Milan diocese to do so. The modern arms set a Visconti castle no source has confirmed beside a tower with a wolf climbing out: the escape of Lupo da Limonta in Tommaso Grossi's Marco Visconti. The tower, in via Roma, is still called Torre del Lupo.