Brugherio

Brugherio means heath: from brugo, the shrub of the high plain, which is also in the town's arms. Anciently brugario meant the common land, later divided between Monza, Vimercate and Cologno. The comune, though, is recent and composite: in 1866 a banker and landowner, Giovanni Noseda, held together Moncucco, Baraggia and San Damiano plus pieces of Monza, of Sesto San Giovanni and of Cernusco, and made Brugherio of them. The earliest notices, on the other hand, are of the fourth century: a late Roman villa that tradition attributes to Saint Ambrose, on a trade road linking Bordeaux to Aquileia.

It is from that villa that the most unusual devotion in Brianza comes. Ambrose is said to have given his sister Marcellina a part of the relics of the Magi, which in 1613 were carried into the parish church of San Bartolomeo — consecrated in 1578 by Saint Charles Borromeo — where they still are, in a seventeenth-century silver reliquary behind the high altar. At Epiphany the reliquary is set in front of the altar and the faithful come to kiss what here are called the ümitt, «the little men»: until the nineteen-fifties people came from every village around. At Moncucco there is another strong piece: the little temple of San Lucio, which Gianmario Andreani had brought here from Lugano stone by stone. And from villa Sormani-Andreani Paolo Andreani rose in a balloon: it was the first balloon flight in the skies of Italy. Today villa Fiorita is the town hall and its park the green drawing room; at the Increa park, where a quarry once was, there is a lake of sixteen hectares.