San Vittore Olona

The saint in the name is Victor Maurus, an African-born soldier who lived in Milan and who, having turned Christian, was tortured and beheaded at Lodi on 3 May 303. For centuries the place was simply San Vittore, as on the map of the Duchy of Milan in the Vatican Gallery of Maps; the river was added to the name in 1864, made necessary by Italian unification.

After the year 1000 water mills began to turn on the Olona, worth enough that the Torriani, Visconti and Sforza fought over them: in 1339 a battle was fought in the fields around the millstones, below the castle. The arms carry a gold castle with three towers on red, in memory of an old fortification that stood by the Olona to guard the mills. In the mid-seventeenth century the fief was sold to Count Vincenzo Ciceri at four thousand lire per hundred hearths; the syndic Francesco Roveda had counted sixty-two, in thirty-three quarters.