Two partisans were tortured and shot on this corner

Partisans and soldiers are remembered within a century of loss

Beside you, a plaque set into the pavement in 2012 remembers the dead of Italy's wars of independence — one of several small memorials clustered so densely on this corner that you could stand still and read a century of loss without moving your feet. A few paces on, another marks where Carlo Mengoni fell in the final days of the partisan war, 26 April 1945 — the fighting still going on in Monza's streets even as Milan was being liberated.

A short walk from here, at 160 metres, a plaque names two men of the 104th Garibaldi Brigade — Giuseppe Centemero and Alberto Paleari — tortured and then shot on 8 November 1944, "caddero entrambi fucilati," the inscription says: both fell, executed, having looked their enemy in the face. A scattering of small stone reminders of a city that suffered occupation and reprisal within living memory.

Older ground surrounds you too. The Arengario (Monza), the 13th-century town hall with its stone loggia known as "la Parléra" — the speaking place, where the commune's decrees were once read aloud — stands just ((sixty metres|Arengario (Monza)]) from you, on Monza's central square. Nearby, the church of San Michele Arcangelo holds a modern memorial statue, and just past it a 1954 plaque marks the birthplace of the painter Mosè Bianchi, honoured fifty years after his death by the city he was born in. A little further along, a house plaque records that Achille Mapelli — one of Garibaldi's Thousand, later a city administrator and deputy — lived out his days here between 1840 and 1894.

A medieval quarter and a castle tower torn down

Two streets over, the low stone bulk of the Duomo of Monza rises where the Lombard queen Theodelinda once worshipped; her chapel, the Cappella di Teodolinda, and a squat 13th-century tower bearing her name both stand within a few hundred metres, alongside the Casa dei Decumani and other stone houses dating to the 1100s and 1200s that line the old cathedral quarter. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited pockets of the city, its medieval fabric barely disturbed by the centuries around it.

Further along, at around 626 metres, a plaque commemorates Paolo Paoletti, an industrial executive killed by terrorists on the morning of 5 February 1980 — one of the grim tally of assassinations from Italy's "years of lead." Closer in, at roughly 237 metres, another plaque marks a building that once served as the local headquarters of the Fascist Party and later a barracks for the Black Brigades, where opponents of the regime were tortured — the same dark seam of twentieth-century history surfacing again just a few minutes' walk from where you started.

West of the cathedral quarter, at about 450 metres, stand the remains of the Visconti Castle (Monza), begun under Galeazzo I Visconti in the 14th century. A 1527 uprising by the citizens of Monza tore down its tallest tower, the Torre dei Forni, beginning the castle's long decline; only a fragment survives today above the Lambro river.

Roman pottery marks an early settlement here

Monza's history reaches back to a Roman settlement — the area around your feet has yielded Samian ware, the fine red pottery traded across the empire, found here as evidence of that early occupation. The city rose to real prominence under the Lombards, its cathedral and royal associations with Theodelinda giving it a status disproportionate to its size, one it never entirely lost even as it became, in the twentieth century, better known for a racetrack than a royal chapel.