Carnate

Carnate lies in the Vimercatese north of Monza and takes in Passirano, long a separate community. Ignazio Cantù traced the name to the Carnutes, a Transalpine Gaulish people; Passirano is said to come from Passirius, a Roman landholder here. The first document naming it, from 1021, calls it vicus et fundus. Its arms bear a red-collared hound rampant on green, taken from those of the de Cagnola, an old Milanese family.

In 1483, on the rector's death, the villagers called in the Carmelites of Milan: they stayed three centuries, rebuilt the church and raised the bell tower still standing, since the nineteenth-century parish church absorbed the old one rather than demolish it. Under father Dionisio Banfo fifteen thousand came on the Sunday after Easter, sleeping in the fields for want of room; the Vimercate clergy accused him of unrestrained begging and the curia tried him. The Banfi silk mill later employed up to three hundred women, outsiders housed in the former convent. In 1869 the comune was suppressed and merged into Bernareggio, autonomous again by 1909.