San Giuliano Milanese

The Roman road from Milan to Piacenza passed by cascina Occhiò, and the spot stood eight miles from the city: it was called Ad Octavum, and the farmstead's name is that number, come all this way across two thousand years. The village proper arrived later, medieval, around the pieve on the road to Lodi. Then came the boundaries: within today's there were eleven autonomous comuni, cut to five and united at last in 1870, the harshest rationalisation in the province of Milan after the capital's own. And there is a reversal in it: first Viboldone swallowed San Giuliano, then in 1893 it was Viboldone that took the name San Giuliano Milanese. The village eaten gave its name to the one that had eaten it.

At Viboldone stands one of the great Lombard abbeys: founded by the Umiliati in the twelfth century, it keeps a cycle of fourteenth-century frescoes of the Giottesque school — the Last Judgement attributed to Giusto de' Menabuoi — which alone justifies the detour off the via Emilia. The monks still hold the hours and the liturgy there. At Zivido, the other memory: here in 1515 Marignano was fought, the battle of the giants, the French of Gian Giacomo Trivulzio against the Swiss mercenaries of Massimiliano Sforza. The abbey's bell tower and two crossed swords are on the civic arms. At unification 394 people lived here; today they are more than forty thousand, and in between comes something nobody expects: at the start of the sixties Olivetti opened its Electronic Research Laboratory here, and from here, together with Pisa, came the company's first steps into electronics. Among irrigation ditches, farmsteads and logistics sheds, San Giuliano is the Milanese south that layers centuries without letting on.