Sangiano

Here, on 24 March 1926, Dario Fo was born, the son of a stationmaster who acted for pleasure. The Nobel Prize for literature came to him in 1997, and all his life Fo said where his theatre came from: from the fables mixed with village news that his maternal grandfather used to tell him, and from the stories brought by travellers and passing craftsmen. The village storytellers, the ones able to recount events by transforming them, are the masters he went on citing, and the jester's performance that made him famous the world over is their voice put back on stage.

The name of the village, on the other hand, does not let itself be explained all the way. In the old documents it appears as Sangiuan, Scanzan, Sanzano, and the readiest explanation is that there was a church dedicated to Saint John; the trouble is that the historical sources never speak of one, and name only a church in the nearby territory of Leggiuno and a baptistery at San Clemente, on monte Picuz. Olivieri, in his dictionary of Lombard place names, proposes instead «sencia» or «singia», from the Latin cingula, meaning a thin strip of land. The first certain mention is from 1346, in the statutes of the roads and waters of the county of Milan, among the places taxed for the upkeep of the road to Rho. In the summer of 1914 there were 250 people from Sangiano scattered across Europe looking for work, nearly all of them bricklayers, and six who were living in America.