Bernareggio

Local tradition derives the name Bernareggio from Hiberna Regis, the king's winter quarters, and has the village growing out of a Roman camp; traces of a camp did turn up at Cascinella, on the western edge of the paleochannel. That paleochannel is the oldest feature here: the hollow left by a watercourse long gone, most likely from the last glaciation, its banks fifteen metres high in places and, on old maps, the boundary with Villanova. The first permanent settlement dates from the tenth century, when a castle was built and handed to the family that took its surname from the place, the Bernareggi.

In 1869 a decree of Vittorio Emanuele II made Bernareggio the seat of a municipality that swallowed Carnate, Ronco Briantino, Aicurzio, Sulbiate and Villanova: put back together today it would near thirty thousand people. It lasted forty years: in 1909 each village went its own way again, except Villanova, which stayed a hamlet. The town's arms show a green shrub across a silver and red field; that nameless shrub comes from the de Bernadegio arms in the Stemmario Trivulziano, where it is a bean plant with twelve pods, six a side.