Cesano Maderno

The name records a woman's inheritance. «Cesano» comes from the personal name Cisius; «Maderno», almost certainly, from Maternus, and it meant that the place had passed down the maternal line. In the Gallery of Maps at the Vatican, on the map of the Duchy of Milan, the town appears as Cesa. In the sixteenth century the Arese bought the fief, and they became Borromeo-Arese when Giulia Arese married Renato Borromeo: another inheritance passing through a woman.

Count Bartolomeo Arese, President of the Senate of Milan, had the palace that bears his name finished in the mid-seventeenth century: a palace of delight with dozens of rooms, the hall of honour frescoed by Procaccini the Younger, Nuvolone, Ghisolfi and Busca, an Italian garden and a nymphaeum. Beside it survives the torrazzo of the castle that stood there before — the one drawn in ruins on the town's arms — and a little further the Portale del Serraglio, the arch that opened onto the reserve where the Borromeo bred fallow deer, red deer and wild boar, and which is gone. Cesano then made furniture: from 1874 a furniture craft fair was held here. Then came the factories, and Snia Viscosa built a whole village for its workers. On 10 July 1976, together with Seveso, Meda and Desio, the town lived through the disaster of the dioxin cloud. Today on its edge lies the LIPU reserve in the Groane park, its ponds born from old clay pits: half an hour from Milan, and two centuries away.