Segrate

The place names of Segrate are a lesson in Lombard toponymy. The ending -ate was attached to the name of a landowner, or to a river, or to a crop: Lambrate comes from the Lambro, Linate from flax. For Segrate the most credited hypothesis is rye, or the verb secare, the cutting of hay. And the quarters are all transparent: Novegro too comes from haymaking, Tregarezzo from a word meaning a quiet place and a stopping point, Rovagnasco from the family name Rubenius; Redecesio either from the hedge stream or — the finest guess — from the wren, which in Milanese dialect is called re de scés, king of the hedges. And then there is the Lavanderie quarter, born in the nineteen-thirties on the initiative of the Milan laundrymen's cooperative, in an area chosen because the water there was particularly pure.

In 1870 Segrate annexed Novegro and Rovagnasco: at first there had been an idea of joining it to Pioltello, and at Pioltello itself, the year before, they had imagined a Greater Pioltello taking in Segrate as well. Nothing came of it on either side. On its territory stand three icons of the twentieth century: the Idroscalo, the sea of Milan, an artificial lake dug in 1930 and two and a half kilometres long; the Mondadori building that Oscar Niemeyer, the man of Brasília, designed in 1975, with its arcades suspended over the water; and Milano 2, the laboratory-quarter of nineteen-seventies building. But the thing nobody expects is at Redecesio: there, in the sixties, the CISE research centre developed the first Italian nuclear reactor to run on non-enriched uranium. At Lavanderie, meanwhile, the Cascina Ovi survives, once a monastery of the Umiliati: it was they who brought this land under cultivation and introduced the water meadows.