There was an abbey here, and not just any abbey: the Olivetan house founded in 1428 by Nicolò Sommariva, brother of cardinal Angelo, and dedicated to the two brothers' saints, Nicholas and the Angel. It was one of the chief abbeys of the diocese of Lodi and the second by income — in the seventeenth century at least ten thousand scudi of revenue — with a rich library and between twenty and thirty monks. In the eighteenth century a grand late Baroque rebuilding was begun, and it never finished: in 1797 the revolutionary French, who had occupied the State of Milan, suppressed the monastery.
Of all this there remain the fifteenth-century church of Santi Michele Arcangelo e Nicola Vescovo, today the parish church, and part of the abbatial palace, long reduced to a farm building. The precious inlays that Fra Giovanni da Verona, himself an Olivetan, had made for Villanova were carried off to Lodi, and since 1963 they stand in the cathedral. The village, called Villa Nuova for centuries, took its present name in 1863; in 1878 it also took in the comuni of Bargano and Mongiardino Sillaro.
No events match these filters.
📅 Every year, on the last Sunday of May
On the last Sunday of May Villanova del Sillaro, a municipality of 1,732 inhabitants in the province of Lodi, celebrates its patron saints Nicolò and Michele.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Villanova del Sillaro, but an easy day trip away.
