Lissone

About the name of Lissone the only certainty is that nobody knows: some derive it from magna lis, the great quarrel, meaning a Roman battle; some from the Lixiones, the legionaries who carried water to the troops; some from the holm oak; and some from the Lexovii, a Celtic tribe of Normandy that also gave its name to Lisieux. The village appears in writing in the tenth century as Vico Lissione. It sits on a low ridge between the Lambro and the Seveso, the same two rivers that flank Seregno, four kilometres from Monza.

Lissone has been a synonym for furniture for over a century: the Brianza of wood has one of its capitals here, with showrooms and workshops that have furnished the homes of half of Italy, and a Library of Furniture and Furnishing with no equal in the country. Not only trade: the Lissone painting prize, born after the war and revived, left as its legacy the MAC, a museum of contemporary art with a collection devoted to abstraction. The centre turns around the parish church of Saints Peter and Paul and around Palazzo Terragni, rationalist architecture bearing the signature of the Como school. There is a bill to pay for that success: according to ISPRA more than seventy per cent of the comune's soil is now built over, the highest figure in Lombardy. Milan and Monza a step away, design in the DNA.