Gallarate

Gallarate owes its fortune to a city that was destroyed: when Ottone Visconti razed Castelseprio in 1287, the town inherited its role as the seat of the Seprio, and from there it began to work as a trading centre. The name, they say, comes from the Gauls, or perhaps from the Insubrian call-aria, gravel land, which is exactly what it stands on. A town of looms and heath, at the beginning of the twentieth century it was known as the town of a hundred chimneys, and the factories built their own workers' villages, later absorbed as neighbourhoods.

In 1926, when the government created the province of Varese, the district of Gallarate — which included Busto Arsizio, Legnano, Saronno and Rho — was split up, and the town lost its administrative weight overnight. It has answered by turning its industrial heritage into a cultural calling: the MA*GA, born of the Premio Gallarate founded in 1949, is one of the leading museums of modern and contemporary art in Lombardy, with thousands of works of the Italian twentieth century. The centre, around the nineteenth-century basilica and the art nouveau palaces, keeps the bourgeois elegance of the cotton years. Malpensa is six kilometres away: many pass through, the shrewder use it as a base, with direct trains to Milan and the lakes within reach of an evening.