Solbiate Arno

The land here has never been generous. The cadastral surveys of 1724 describe a poor cereal agriculture, supplemented by silkworm rearing, with the estates in the hands of great Milanese families such as the Mantegazza and the peasants bound by onerous tenancy contracts. The turn came from the blacksmiths: their craft workshops, driven by the water of the torrents, became in the last third of the nineteenth century first machine shops and then engineering works, which between the two wars lived on state contracts. After 1945, in the post-war slump, the skilled workers left without jobs reinvented themselves on their own account, and from that come the many small and medium firms of today.

Four thousand two hundred and seventy-four inhabitants in the province of Varese, on the Lombard Arno, the stream that runs down towards the Ticino and has nothing to do with the Tuscan river. In Roman times the road linking Novara to Como by way of Castel Seprio passed through here; later the village entered the fief of Gallarate, which lasted five centuries. On annexation to the Kingdom of Sardinia, Solbiate lost its independence and became a hamlet of Albizzate: it won it back only in 1905, by decree of Victor Emmanuel III.