Cuasso al Monte

For a time this municipality had three mayors at once. They were elected by acclamation in the public squares, held office for three years, and divided the work between them: one took administration, one the police, one justice. Above them was a podestà who lived at Arcisate, the head of the pieve, while in the village itself there resided only a mayor-chancellor. The commune was then a fief of count Giulio Visconti Borromeo Arese, and in 1757 an edict united the two separate places of Cuasso al Monte and Cuasso al Piano into a single municipality.

Three thousand six hundred and four inhabitants in the province of Varese, covering the whole eastern flank of Monte Piambello, from the two hundred and seventy-four metres of the Ceresio plain to the one thousand one hundred and twenty-nine of the summit. The convent of Sant'Angelo, in the place called Deserto, has had five lives: founded in 1635 by Discalced Carmelites, suppressed in 1798, it became the villa of count Vincenzo Dandolo — where Grossi, Mazzini and Garibaldi passed through — then from 1906 an agricultural colony and school for orphaned children, then a barracks between 1916 and 1917, and finally, bought by the Milan Red Cross, the first pavilion of the hospital.