Patron saint festival In 179 days
Feast of Saint Zeno
📅 Every year, on 12 April
On 12 April Campione d'Italia celebrates its patron Saint Zeno, to whom the town's church is dedicated; the town also has the Chiesa di Santa Maria dei Ghirli.
Campione d'Italia is the only Italian exclave: a piece of the province of Como entirely surrounded by Switzerland, on the lake of Lugano. It exists because of a will. In 777 Toto of Campione, a Lombard landowner, died leaving his lands to the archbishop of Milan; in 784 they passed to the monastery of Sant'Ambrogio, and from then on Campione was a fief of the abbey for nine centuries, a jurisdictional island recognised by the Empire. When the Swiss cantons took the Lugano region in 1521, that status saved the village from annexation: the border you see today is the edge of an eighth-century donation.
The name, by contrast, is recent. Until 1865 the village was Campione d'Intelvi, then simply Campione; the «d'Italia» arrived under fascism, by a royal decree of 1933 requested by the podestà, and nobody has taken it away since. From here came, for centuries, the Maestri Campionesi, the stonecutters, master builders and architects who worked across half of Lombardy. And the border of the nearest Italian comune is seven hundred and twenty metres away as the crow flies: to get there by car takes fifteen kilometres, all of them in Switzerland.
🎉 Festivals and feasts in Campione d'Italia 1
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Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Campione d'Italia
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Places to see within 25 km
Outside Campione d'Italia, but an easy day trip away.
certosa di Parma 📍 Parma · 8.3 km The charterhouse of Stendhal's title, now a police school and rarely open. Parma Baptistery 📍 Parma · 11 km Benedetto Antelami’s pink marble masterpiece, a European landmark bridging Romanesque and Gothic design in Parma. arco di San Lazzaro 📍 Parma · 9.8 km Arch of San Lazzaro in Parma, built in 1628 on via Emilia Est, restored in 2005. chiesa di San Sepolcro 📍 Parma · 11 km The Holy Sepulchre canons' church on the via Emilia, with a coffered ceiling. abbazia di San Giovanni Evangelista 📍 Parma · 11 km Correggio's second dome in Parma, and the Benedictine pharmacy with its jars in rows. teatro Farnese 📍 Parma · 12 km The Farnese wooden theatre in the Pilotta, inaugurated with a naval battle in the stalls.