What to See in Cantù: Attractions & Sights

More places of interest

Parco delle Groane e della Brughiera Briantea

The regional park of the Groane and the Brughiera Briantea is a protected area of the upper Lombard plain, north-west of Milan. It was created in 1976 as the Parco delle Groane, at the wish of the municipalities and the Region, and in December 2017 it absorbed the Brughiera Briantea park and the Fontana del Guercio nature reserve, reaching over eight thousand hectares. Today it touches 28 municipalities in three provinces: among those in the province of Como is Cantù, with Cabiate, Carimate, Cermenate, Cucciago, Figino Serenza and Mariano Comense. The name comes from «groane», the local word for heathland.
What to see
The vegetation has three faces: heath, pinewood and oakwood. The heath takes its Italian name from brugo, common heather, a plant of acid soils, and arises where woodland has been destroyed by felling, grazing or fire; it is a temporary environment, which within a few decades is covered by birches, aspens and Scots pines and turns into pinewood. The pinewood too is a transitional stage: the Scots pine was planted on a large scale in the eighteenth century, under Austrian rule, to make use of the clay soils, and without human care it gives way to oakwood of pedunculate and sessile oaks. Woods cover about a quarter of the park; the rest is heath and farmland.
In the ponds live the Italian crested newt, the tree frog, the Italian agile frog and the fire salamander. Birds include the green woodpecker, the great spotted woodpecker, the kestrel, the buzzard and the long-eared owl; mammals include the fox, which is very numerous, the edible dormouse, the hazel dormouse and the red squirrel, reintroduced by the park authority in the nineteen-eighties.
Visiting
The park is crossed by sixteen paths, about a hundred kilometres in all. Access, routes and rules should be checked on the park authority's official website.
Our editors' tip
The soil explains the landscape: the park lies on a clay plateau of the type known as «ferretto», between 160 and 300 metres above sea level. In the northern part the black woodpecker and red deer have recently been reported, and now and then young dispersing wolves.
Santuario della Madonna dei Miracoli

The sanctuary of the Madonna dei Miracoli, in Cantù, stands where tradition places a Marian apparition. Outside the old Campo Rotondo gate a pillar carried a painting of the Nursing Madonna, known to the people as «Santa Maria Bella». In May 1543, the story goes, a young girl named Angiolina, from the Cascina Novello, went to pray before the image for an end to the famine afflicting the Cantù area: the Madonna is said to have appeared to her, announcing the end of the calamity and telling her to go into the fields to reap an abundant harvest. The sanctuary was built between 1554 and 1555.
What to see
The façade, in an eclectic style between Neoclassical and Neo-Baroque, was made in cement between 1900 and 1901 to a design by Italo Zanini; high up, a niche holds a statue of the Assumption. The front part of the church had collapsed in October 1837 and was rebuilt to a design by Giacomo Moraglia, opening in 1863. The interior has a nave and two aisles; the aisles end in two chapels, dedicated to Saint Anthony and Saint Teresa of Avila.
In the presbytery is the venerated image: the Virgin seated on a Gothic throne with three gables, nursing the Child, with two angel musicians, datable between the fourteenth and the mid-fifteenth century. The walls and dome of the presbytery were frescoed in 1637-1638 by Giovanni Mauro della Rovere, known as Fiammenghino: in the dome a ring-shaped portico opens onto the sky, where the Virgin of the Assumption sits among angel musicians; on the walls are the Visit of the Magi and the Marriage at Cana. The paintings in the choir, of about 1680, are attributed to Giovanni Stefano Danedi.
Visiting
Opening and Mass times should be checked with the sanctuary or on the website of Cantù town council.
Our editors' tip
Besides the frescoes, look for two canvases: the Coronation of the Virgin by Camillo Procaccini, of 1610, and the Apparition of Christ to Saint Teresa by Charles Grandon, of 1714. The Neoclassical altar that holds the image of Santa Maria Bella dates from 1852, to a design by Pompeo Calvi.