Vizzola Ticino

The name of this village is a measure of wine: Vizzola is held to come from the dialect vegiola or vezzola, the measure used in the country round Bergamo and Piacenza, and several historians read in it an old specialisation in vines that is now entirely lost. What the place has, if anything, is water and air. It lies inside a great natural bend of the Ticino, along the Villoresi canal, and it is the smallest comune of the Ticino park. Its other centre, Castelnovate, was, together with Pombia, one of the most important fords on the Como-Novara road, in a commanding position above a narrow bend of the river; of its castle a few ruins remain between the village and the water, overrun by vegetation, with herringbone masonry made of river pebbles and two stout towers. Castelnovate was for a long time an autonomous comune, and in sixty years it changed status four times: annexed to Vizzola in 1809, then briefly united to Somma Lombardo, autonomous again in 1816 under the Lombard-Venetian Kingdom, and finally re-joined with the unification of Italy, when the comune took the name it has now, in 1869.

Then came electricity and flight. At the end of the eighteen hundreds one of the largest electrical generating plants in Europe was built here, driven by a canal drawn from the Ticino. And in 1909 the Caproni family settled here, and began a radical agricultural reclamation and an aeronautical industry: the first flight of the first aeroplane they built, in 1910, took place at Vizzola Ticino. Giovanni Battista Caproni then founded a school for pilots and a great works for the CA-3 trimotor biplane, the first of a long line of bombers. The same family also dug up the ground it had drained: it was Federico Caproni, Gianni's brother, who in the nineteen-thirties ran the archaeological campaigns, which started from the chance finds the farmers were turning up as they worked the fields. Out came burials of the late phase of the La Tène culture and, at the place called Foresta Fugazza, a conglomerate cistern lined with cocciopesto, of a size such as had never been seen in Lombardy. Today the comune borders the runways of Malpensa.