Azzate

In 1717 the Val Bodia changed its name and became the Val Bossa. Not for any geographical reason, but because the Bossi family had been the masters of Azzate for centuries: entered in 1277 in archbishop Ottone Visconti's Matricula Nobilium as Bossis de Acciate, they obtained the lordship of the village in 1439, when it was detached from the fief of Varese, and held it until 1657. The fief then passed to the Alfieri, the Torriani, Giulio Visconti, Paolo Nolo; they, on the other hand, stayed, keeping the country house carved out of the old fortified manor even when, in the nineteenth century, they went to live permanently near Como. Their surname stayed stuck to the valley.

The village, four thousand five hundred and fifty-four inhabitants in the province of Varese, is above all a catalogue of villas: the eighteenth-century ones stand almost all to the north of the built-up area, along the edge that looks out over Lake Varese, where the slope has always been too steep for housing estates to grow and the view has been left intact. In the parish church of Santa Maria, already mentioned in documents of 1224 and rebuilt in neo-Gothic form in the nineteenth century, hang a canvas by Callisto Piazza and paintings attributed to Morazzone, to Nuvolone and — a much disputed attribution — to Holbein.