There are two roads to the name. The first leads to the Latin in arce, the high fortified place, and the hills that overlook the plain make it plausible. The second, argued by Olivieri, leads to in arso, the burnt place: because the soil is dark, or because in the Brabbia marsh, which takes up half of the municipal territory, there is a thick layer of peat that catches fire and has gone on burning down the centuries. The village appears as Aza on the map of the Duchy of Milan painted in 1581 in the Vatican palaces, and in 1300 Goffredo da Bussero, recording the church of San Pietro, got the spelling wrong and wrote marzo.
For centuries Inarzo was a border village, and it had three different borders: it belonged to the Visconti fief of Albizzate, administratively it lay in the pieve of Somma, and religiously in that of Besozzo. The neighbouring villages lay in different pievi and even in another province, so much so that until 1927 Inarzo was in the province of Milan while Bodio and Cazzago were in that of Como. It became an autonomous municipality only in 1958, the youngest in the province of Varese: before that it was a hamlet of Casale Litta, and in the whole of western Lombardy no other such case is recorded.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Inarzo
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
