Morazzone

In 1963 the municipality gave itself a coat of arms by assembling whatever seemed to fit: an eagle, two crossed swords, a lion. None of those symbols had any real connection with the place, and in time that began to grate. In 1991 the historian Diego Della Gasperina found in the Stemmario Archinto, in the Royal Library of Turin, arms labelled de Morazono: they were those of the Mazzucchelli, the local family from which the painter Pier Francesco, known as Il Morazzone, descended. The council began using them unofficially, and in 2009 a decree of the President of the Republic made them official, retiring the invented arms.

Four thousand three hundred and three inhabitants in the province of Varese, on wooded moraine hills crossed by the Tenore stream. The painter who gave everyone the nickname was born here in July 1573; the surname Mazzucchelli, meanwhile, comes from the Insubrian mazzùch, big head, meaning stubborn, which is why the family arms carry a human head. In the parish church of Sant'Ambrogio two granite blocks are preserved commemorating the brothers Marcus and Lucius Senzius, legionaries of the Fourth Scythian legion in the first century. On the twenty-sixth of August 1848 a small Garibaldian force and Austrian troops fought here.