Veduggio con Colzano

Twice in its history this municipality has ceased to exist. In the Napoleonic period its territory was attached to Renate, and under fascism the same thing happened again: two different regimes, the same decision, and both times it came back as an independent commune. It was, after all, tiny. Veduggio alone counted some eighty inhabitants in 1751, risen to a little over three hundred twenty years later and doubled by 1805; in 1861, at the last Austro-Hungarian census, it still had not reached six hundred. The municipality together with Colzano dates only from 1865, although the two villages had always shared a single parish.

Today the inhabitants number four thousand four hundred and thirty-four, and this is the northernmost municipality of the province of Monza and Brianza. Since 1983 about half the territory has lain inside the Parco della Valle del Lambro, where the river runs in a bed so deep that cars keep away from it. In the second half of the nineteenth century the divisionist painter Giovanni Segantini lived here. The coat of arms, granted in 1962, almost certainly derives from that of the da Erba family, who from 1684 held the fief of Mondonico, of which Colzano was then part.