Caravate

There are three explanations for the name Caravate, and they do not agree. One traces it to the Celtic personal name Carevus with the suffix -ate; another to the pre-Latin carabus, from the root karra, "stone", that is a heap of stones; the third, the most evocative, to the old Caravè, the hemp retting pit, and it rests on finds that suggest a great marsh around the river Viganella, inhabited by hemp growers living in pile dwellings. Then there is a document: a parchment of the year 712 listing the Valcuvia possessions of the Pavia monastery of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro names Calariate, that is Caravate — but Calariate is also one of the old names of Gallarate.

The village spreads at the foot of San Clemente, Picuz and Sasso Poiano, scattered over a dozen hamlets. On the hill stands the church of San Clemente, of the ninth and tenth centuries; the old Sant'Agostino is Romanesque; the parish church of Santi Giovanni Battista e Maurizio was begun in 1831 on a crag, in the Castello hamlet, to a design by the engineer Lorenzo Bernago; and the small Santa Lucia, from the nineteen-sixties, is the work of the architect Luciano Baldessari. At the beginning of the twentieth century people here milled, sawed and fired: mills, an oil press, a water-powered sawmill, a continuous-fire kiln. The wine was well thought of too, from the Sassa vineyards and the "Pancotto" made with the grapes of the Ronco.