Comerio

The arms of Comerio carry mulberry trees, in memory of the silkworm rearing that fed the yarn industry; they were granted on 16 January 1961, when what the village made was something else entirely. In 1946 the Milanese businessman Giovanni Borghi had founded SIRI there, known to everyone as Ignis, which made a fortune out of household appliances: in 1972 it passed to the Dutch multinational Philips and in 1991 to the American Whirlpool. Before the factory the village had grown slowly: in 1809 it was annexed to Gavirate, and in 1927 it was Comerio's turn to absorb Barasso and Luvinate, which became independent again at the end of the Second World War.

The name is older than all of this. The Celts arrived in the fourth century BC and founded here, between Milan, Lake Maggiore and Como, the settlement of Kunmaer: from there, by way of Gunmeri, Gomeri and the Comero of the communal age, the name became Comerio. From the Middle Ages the church of San Celso survives, Romanesque, built between the tenth and the eleventh century and declared a national monument in 1922. And there is a record no one expects of a village of two thousand six hundred inhabitants: the Comerio Tennis Club, with Fausto Gardini, Nicola Pietrangeli and Orlando Sirola, won the Italian men's team championship in 1961 and in 1962.