Aicurzio

At Aicurzio the Templars left two buildings and half a village: La Commenda and Castel Negrino were settlements dependent on the Milanese preceptory of Santa Maria del Tempio, and the hospitale on an old consular road was built, in the first half of the twelfth century, by friar Dalmazio da Verzario, the first Italian-speaking Magister Templi. When the order was dissolved, everything passed to the knights of St John of Jerusalem, then of Rhodes and of Malta, who remained the owners for more than half a millennium, until the Napoleonic suppression. The two buildings ended up on the municipal coat of arms.

The story still told in the village, though, is a different one: the celestial army that appeared at Campegorino, where the flocks once grazed, put the attackers to flight and saved Aicurzio; who the attackers were the versions do not agree on — Spaniards for some, French and Austrians for others — but the ending is always the same, and the sanctuary was built on that spot. Aicurzio's contribution to the Five Days of Milan, on the other hand, is documented: on 20 April 1848 the Monza newspaper Il Brianteo thanked the village for the bread, yellow and white, sent to the fighters.