Rho

The h in the middle of the name has been official only since 1932: it was there to tell this Rho from another, in the province of Ferrara. Before that the town had been Raude, Rodo, Rhaudum, even Aro on a map of the Duchy of Milan. Its street plan still preserves the Roman centuriation — cardo and decumanus still cross in Piazza San Vittore — and in 1004 the emperor Henry II, who had stopped here, repaid the hospitality by granting it the rank of borgo and a weekly market: it is still held, every Monday, a thousand years later.

The world came through Rho in 2015: the Expo Milano site, built beside the Fiera Milano complex — one of the largest exhibition centres in Europe — turned this commuter town into an international address, relaunched today by the MIND innovation district with the Human Technopole. Historic Rho holds on around the sanctuary of the Addolorata, a place of pilgrimage since the sixteenth century with its college of Oblates. In the Middle Ages the town mattered enough to be destroyed by Barbarossa during the siege of Milan, and to send to the First Crusade the semi-legendary Giovanni da Raude, who by tradition raised the Christian banner on the walls of Jerusalem. The Salone del Mobile and the great trade fairs fill it in waves: business travellers know it well, and travellers heading for Milan use it as a shrewd base on the metro.