Varano Borghi

Until 1906 the village was called simply Varano; then it took the surname of the family that had remade it. Between 1900 and 1904 the Borghi built a large textile works here: to the old mill known as Pasquale's, where the dye-house stood, were added the spinning mill, the rope rooms, the ovens, the stable and even a small barracks for the private fire brigade; the design was by the Swiss practice Sequin-Knobel, the shed roofs were there to let the daylight in, and the opening was on 8 September 1904, with senators, a deputy, the prefect and the great names of Varese industry. A narrow-gauge railway carried raw cotton from the station to the works and brought the yarn back.

The Borghi made the rest of the village too: the family villa, reworked between 1860 and 1879 by the architect Paolo Cesa Bianchi — a Milanese of Varano origin — with its English park and a part meant to recall a Far Eastern garden; the parish church of the Divine Redeemer, by the same architect, inspired by the fifteenth-century collegiate church of Castiglione Olona; and the cemetery, with the family chapel of 1911, covered in glazed terracotta of a blue meant for the vault of heaven. Before all this Varano was an anomaly: a fief of its own, held by the Trecchi, then the Guilizzoni and from 1774 the Lemine, with no parish, so isolated that Napoleon tried to attach it to Ternate and failed. Yet it already appears on the map of the Duchy of Milan of 1581, the one in the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican.