Molteno

HC San Giorgio Molteno once dissolved itself. In 2000, with the senior side struggling in Serie C, the club shut it down and put everything into the youth ranks instead. It took five years to bring a senior squad back to Serie C, three more to reach Serie B, and two more again to reach Serie A2.

The gamble traces back further than the club's own founding in 1977. Two years earlier, a physical education teacher named Elio Mauri had put together a youth team in Molteno, and that side became the root from which the senior club grew. The pattern of building through the academy rather than around it has stuck: Nicholas Trost came through the Molteno youth system and went on to play for Italy's senior national team at the Mediterranean Games.

Known locally as Oronero for its gold and black colours, and for years carried in results sheets under the name of its cured-meat sponsor, the club has spent most of its senior history moving between divisions rather than settling in one. Promotion to Serie A in 1984 lasted a single season; a return in 2017 lasted two; another in 2020 lasted one. The 2025–26 Serie A Silver Girone A title sends it back up again for 2026–27, a fourth attempt to stay.

None of that history carries the weight, locally, of the fixture against Pallamano Cassano Magnago. Whatever else the table says in a given season, that match is still called the derby.