Bregano

This hill was a cemetery for fifteen centuries. The digs of the early twentieth century turned up rectangular tombs oriented east to west, two metres long and seventy centimetres deep, built of rough serizzo stones, holding jugs, dishes and bowls of fired clay, copper bowls, an iron sickle, heavy nails, a buckle, a bronze handle and imperial coins of the later second century; and then more tombs of the Lombard period. The burial use of the hill begins around the third century and runs on to the eighteenth.

That the place counted for more than it looks is told by the notarial deeds: around the year one thousand Bregano was not a group of farmsteads but a territory organised inside and outside a castrum, and in one deed of donation a man gives his sister three vineyards and a slave. A gravestone of 1230 says that the church on the summit belonged to a family living in a castellaccio; the castrum was probably destroyed in 1280, during the Torriani wars, and near the Cascina del Monte a stump of tower two and a half metres high still stands with its loopholes. The parish, though, was Biandronno's for a thousand years, until 1942. Suppressed as a comune in 1809 and autonomous again from 1816, Bregano built its own town hall in 1927 with its citizens' hands, and on 1 January 2023 it merged with Bardello and Malgesso.