Sesto Calende

Sesto Calende sits at the southern tip of Lake Maggiore, where the Ticino leaves the lake and heads back towards the Po. The name is Roman throughout: Sesto comes from ad sextum lapidem, the sixth milestone, since the place lay six Roman miles from Somma Lombardo on the road from Milan to the Verbano; Calende recalls the calends, when the public market was held here in Roman times. The abbey of San Donato, raised between the ninth and tenth centuries, kept to Pavia and to the Roman rite although it stood well inside Ambrosian territory: the town belonged to the diocese of Pavia until the nineteenth century.

Before the railway the economy was on the river. The boats belonged to Sesto merchants, who handed them to the paroni, pilots able to steer hulls up to twenty metres long through the eleven rapids between Sesto and Tornavento, each with its own dialect name; the best came only from Golasecca and Castelletto Ticino, passing the craft from father to son. They were a closed guild with a kind of licence: they set their rates and no one joined without their leave. The town's arms go back to the sixteenth century and pair a die, for fortune, with a compass, for precision, as painted in 1564 on the front of Palazzo Riboni for Apostolo Verali.