Luvinate

Inside a golf club, here, there is a Benedictine cloister. Of the former monastery of Sant'Antonio, which today houses the seat of the Varese Golf Club, a cloister of the fifteenth century survives; beside it stands the church of Sant'Antonio, a Romanesque building earlier than 1150, which in 1876 still had apses that can no longer be seen. The rest of the village gathers around the parish church of Saints Hippolytus and Cassian and is crossed by the Tinella torrent. The comune's coat of arms, granted by decree of the President of the Republic of 7 October 1963, shows a silver tower founded on the green plain and flanked by two sunflowers.

The administrative history of Luvinate is that of a village which first swallowed and was then swallowed. In 1751 it was enfeoffed to Giulio Visconti Borromeo Arese, in the pieve of Varese, and counted a little more than two hundred inhabitants; in 1812, with the Napoleonic concentration of the smaller comuni, it annexed Barasso, Morosolo, Casciago and Oltrona, and reached a little more than five hundred souls by 1853. Then, in 1927, it was fascism that annexed Luvinate to Comerio. The comune came back, and by 1961 it counted more than eight hundred inhabitants. Of that middle period there remains villa Mazzorin, built in 1877 in eclectic style inside a large English garden, commissioned by the Mazzorin, a Venetian family who in 1930 passed the property to the Rossi: the complex includes also a farm building in neo-Gothic style. And between 1914 and 1940 Luvinate had a stop of the Varese-Angera tramway, the same line that stopped at Ranco, on the other side of the province.