Besano

Underneath Besano there is a Triassic sea. The Besano-Monte San Giorgio deposit, bituminous shales laid down slowly on the bed of a shallow sea, holds marine reptiles, fish and other animals that fell to that bed and stayed there for 235 million years; it has been studied since the middle of the nineteenth century, and in 1993 it yielded the fossil of an aquatic reptile that took the village's name, the Besanosaurus, now in the Natural History Museum of Milan. The museum at Besano shows a cast of the giant, several specimens of tanystropheus — the odd reptile with a giraffe's neck — and a reconstruction of Saltriovenator, one of the very few dinosaurs found in Italy, whose remains come from nearby Saltrio.

Where the village's name comes from, on the other hand, nobody knows: the most widespread guess has it born from bis in anno, after the fair held here twice a year. Above the houses the hill of San Martino, probably a Celtic fort and then a Roman castrum guarding the roads to the Ceresio, carries a small Romanesque church with a fifteenth-century Madonna and Child. Besano was annexed to Bisuschio in 1809, to Porto in 1812 and again in 1928, and each time it became a municipality once more. The Varese-Porto Ceresio railway crosses its territory without stopping: when the trains were suspended between 2009 and 2018 for the works, the replacement buses did have a stop at Besano, and building a station was considered, but nothing came of it.