Marnate

The name has no single explanation: some trace it to a Marino among the first settlers, some to marl, the clayey limestone spread on fields to enrich them, some to a supply depot for legions bound for Gaul. Rome left the memory of a military river port on the Olona, then a route towards Gaul: the church of the Madonna began as part of the works defending port and road, and became a place of worship only later.

Marnate first appears on an eleventh-century inscription, now in Milan's archaeological museum, recording a nobleman's bequest of lands to a Milanese church. Nizzolina, the hamlet to the east, joined the comune in 1866; its name comes from the hazel, niscioa in dialect, and in the seventeenth century it was a fief of eleven families. In the parish church of Sant'Ilario, lengthened in the early twentieth century by the local architect Camillo Crespi Balbi, the bell tower rises in the middle of the facade, unusual, and a nod to France, the saint's homeland.