Bisuschio

In 1565 Bisuschio still depended on the parish of Arcisate, and to break away it needed a decent church, which it did not have. Cecilia Mozzoni promised to build one and meanwhile bought the land of the old chapel of San Giorgio in Monte, which stood next to the family house: she had it pulled down, enlarged her garden and reused the rubble as ornament. The new church went up elsewhere, on the flat, and for that reason they called it San Giorgio al piano, on the level; today the qualifier has dropped away, because nobody remembers any more that there was one up the hill. The separation from Arcisate came in 1605.

Four thousand two hundred and sixty-seven inhabitants in the province of Varese, in the Valceresio. The name is said to come from the Latin bis-ustum, burned twice, probably in memory of two fires suffered at the hands of the Raetians and the Franks. In the fifteenth century the valley was still wild enough to justify a bear-hunting lodge, which the Mozzoni built themselves: in the autumn of 1476 the duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, was invited to a hunt at what is now Villa Cicogna Mozzoni. In 1872 the front of the parish church, by then too cramped, was dismantled and rebuilt three metres eighty further forward.