Where the Naviglio Grande bends toward Milan, Abbiategrasso keeps a fourteenth-century Visconti castle and an author's surprise: the pronaos of Santa Maria Nuova, a monumental four-sided portico attributed to Bramante, among the most original works of the Lombard Renaissance. The centre, all courtyards and porticoes, moves at a water town's pace.
Lombardy's first "cittaslow", it cultivates the vocation proudly: markets, osterias of frogs and risotto, bicycles along the towpath. The Ticino park begins at its edge: herons, oxbows and mills for a Sunday that still tastes of the Lombard countryside.
Near Abbiategrasso
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
