opposite sides of the lake, separated by a narrow stretch of blue
water. Though bearing the name of the former burgh, it was in
Arona[1], where his family also possessed a property, that Pietro
Martire d'Anghera first saw the light, in the year 1457[2]. He was not
averse to reminding his friends of the nobility of his family, whose
origin he confidently traced to the Counts of Anghera, a somewhat
fabulous dynasty, the glories of whose mythical domination in Northern
Italy are preserved in local legends and have not remained entirely
unnoticed by sober history. What name his family bore is unknown; the
statement that it was a branch of the Sereni, originally made by Celso
Rosini and repeated by later writers, being devoid of foundation. Ties
of relationship, which seem to have united his immediate forebears
with the illustrious family of Trivulzio and possibly also with that
of Borromeo, furnished him with sounder justification for some pride
of ancestry than did the remoter gestes of the apocryphal Counts of
Anghera.[3]

[Note 1: Ranke, in his _Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtsschreiber_,
and Rawdon Brown, in his _Calendar of State Papers relating to
England, preserved in the Archives of Venice_, mention Anghera, or
Anghiera, as the name is also written, as his birthplace. Earlier
Italian writers such as Piccinelli (_Ateneo de' Letterati Milanesi_)
and Giammatteo Toscano (_Peplus Ital_) are perhaps responsible
for this error, which passages in the _Opus Epistolarum_, that
inexplicably escaped their notice, expose. In a letter addressed to
Fajardo occurs the following explicit statement: "..._cum me utero
mater gestaret sic volente patre, Aronam, ubi plæraque illis erant
prædia domusque ... ibi me mater dederat orbi_." Letters 388, 630, and
794 contain equally positive assertions.]