Vanzago

Vanzago lies northwest of Milan and keeps more than half its land green, between the southern agricultural park, the WWF wood and the lower Olona park. Its origins are Celtic and the first written records of the name go back to 864; the toponym is now read as village by the water. The place was never held in fief and kept its formal independence, passing instead between landowning families: the Simonetta, the Croce, the Besozzi, the Pusterla, the Calderara, the Gattinoni, the Ferrario. Its arms carry a gold lion on red holding a silver Latin cross: local historians trace it to the Simonetta emblem, though red and gold may equally recall the Calderari, Milanese nobles who held a castle and lands here.

Of the nunnery that stood in the village until the late fifteenth century nothing survives but the name: the courtyard is still called the Monasterolo, and off it opens an eighteenth-century oratory dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, paid for by Count Antonio Simonetta and replacing an older chapel that the Borromean pastoral visits had recorded in the middle of the yard. In the park of Villa Gattinoni, now home to a foundation for the elderly, grows a ginkgo biloba which at the time of its transplanting was among the first of its species planted in Italy.