Associazione Cittadini Bovisasca

The children played peacefully in the protected area of the farmyard, under the careful and loving supervision of their mothers, without particular dangers.
Each family in front of their home, then, had a mulberry tree, a plant native to China: these trees were important because their leaves were the favorite food of silkworms.
Until the Byzantine era, silk production had been an ancient secret and China, which had the monopoly, sold these fabrics all over the world.
The silkworm (Bombyx mori) is a lepidopteran insect, a species of butterfly, belonging to the Bombycidae family, native to eastern Asia. The larvae of these insects secrete a sticky liquid called sericin, which hardens on contact with air, forming a cocoon. The cocoon serves as a refuge for the silkworm and is the source of silk fibers. Before the silkworms transform into moths, the cocoons are carefully collected. The silkworm essentially loses 90% of its weight by releasing silk. At this point, having significantly reduced its size, the metamorphosis begins. The larva then becomes a chrysalis that after twelve days will transform into a butterfly, leaving the cocoon full of silk.
Once it was discovered which insect produced this wonderful yarn and which leaves it fed on, silk was also produced in Europe. This is how the white mulberry – Morus alba – appeared in our territory, so called for its white fruits in the shape of oblong blackberries, recognizable by the cinnamon-colored bark and large leaves of different shapes. Silkworm breeding was very common throughout the Lombardy region.
In many popular songs, the Milanese terms of murun, moron or muru can be found to indicate mulberry trees (“Tri Cu D’ai / murun fa l’uga lerai / col ciondolo lerai ..”), cavalee or bigatt to indicate silkworms while galet are cocoons.
In the central part of the Cascina there were stables where dairy cows found refuge. On the upper floor, through a hole in the floor, it was easy to drop hay directly into the animals’ mangers with a pitchfork.
The Bovisasca has been an important communication route for centuries, along which Roman armies, Napoleonic troops and Hitler’s armies passed.
It is said that the Cascina was used as a leper colony during the plague of Manzonian memory in 1630 and that Napoleonic troops rested here before the battles of Marengo. Almost certainly, some elderly inhabitants of the area remember it well, in these areas the German anti-aircraft was located in defense of the Bovisa gasometer. Many also remember the labor work carried out by the Russian prisoners camped under tents, not far from the Cascina.
Today the Cascina San Mamete continues to live. Twenty families live there and thanks to the solidarity of the local inhabitants recently (September 2024) it was possible to organize a string concert in the farmyard, an event that was a great popular success and made known or rediscover a place that seemed unknown even to many Bovisaschesi.