What to see · Cinisello Balsamo

More places of interest

• Parco Nord Milano

  The Parco Nord Milano is a metropolitan peri-urban park of about six hundred and forty hectares on the northern edge of Milan, classified as regional. It spreads across the comuni of Milan, Bresso, Cusano Milanino, Cormano, Cinisello Balsamo, Novate Milanese and Sesto San Giovanni.

  What to see

  It was created at first on the disused areas of Breda Aeronautica, right after the Second World War. The idea dates from the late 1960s; in 1970 a prefect's decree classified it as a «park of public interest» and in 1975 the Lombardy Region recognised it as a regional park. The first reforestation dates from 1983. It lies in one of the most densely urbanised settings in Europe, among historic factories now almost entirely vanished and large housing districts: the remaining farm plots that escaped concreting have been partly reclaimed, greened and equipped for public use, and partly left intact. According to the sources the green already created exceeds three hundred and fifty hectares, among woods, clearings, tree rows, scrub, hedges and small bodies of water.

  In the northern sector the park's first lake, the lago di Niguarda, was built between 2011 and 2015 and takes its water from the Villoresi canal; it is almost half a kilometre long, sixty metres wide and four deep, with banks that are mostly natural and closed to the public, to encourage a wetland environment where the crested newt and the grey heron have already reappeared. Among the trees there are over a hundred woody species, but only about thirty per cent are native. There are also three cycle-and-pedestrian footbridges and, at Bresso, an open-air cycling track.

  Visiting

  The park is heavily used and has many entrances; for Cinisello Balsamo a footbridge crosses the road to Bresso and the A4 motorway and links the park to the Campo dei Fiori district. The body that runs it, made up of the six comuni around the park and the metropolitan city of Milan, has its seat in the Cascina Centro Parco, reached from Bresso. The sources consulted give no hours or access rules: check with the managing body.

  Our editors' tip

  Inside the park stands the villa of Alessandro Manzoni at Brusuglio. On the border between Sesto San Giovanni and Bresso there is also the so-called «montagnetta», made in the last century from the waste of the steelworks and then reclaimed: it is the only rise in a park that is mostly flat.

• Villa Ghirlanda Silva

  Villa Ghirlanda Silva is a seventeenth-century noble villa in Cinisello Balsamo: a villa di delizia, the classic suburban residence that the nobles of the time built outside the city as a place for stays and holidays. The complex includes an English garden, now a city park; villa and park are protected as cultural heritage.

  What to see

  According to the Description of the Villa Silva of 1811, it was built around 1660 by Donato I Silva on a sixteenth-century predecessor; the works are said to have been overseen by Gian Domenico Richini, son of the better-known Francesco Maria. The plan is a horseshoe, with a courtyard of honour dominated by a large Magnolia grandiflora and a Roman sarcophagus of the second century. The main façade, facing the city, has on the ground floor a portico of seven arches twenty-five metres long; the piano nobile has two superimposed loggias, which the sources call unique among Lombard villas di delizia. The east façade was renewed in 1852 by Carlo Ghirlanda Silva in Romantic taste, with terracotta, white marble and six ovals showing the four seasons, agriculture and fertility.

  From the porch one enters the Sala degli Specchi (Hall of Mirrors), named for four large mirrors in carved and gilded wooden frames; above the door a plaque recalls the summer stay in 1787 of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Este and Maria Beatrice d'Este, who came to Cinisello to get away from Monza, where smallpox threatened. The park, of about five and a half hectares, is enclosed by a wall; Ercole Silva, author in 1801 of the treatise Dell'arte dei giardini inglesi, transformed it in the early nineteenth century into what the sources call the first complete English garden in Italy.

  Visiting

  The villa has belonged to the Comune since 1974. It housed the city library until 2012 and still has municipal offices; some halls are used for meetings, exhibitions and ceremonies, and the south wing is home to the Museo Nazionale di Fotografia. The sources consulted give no opening hours for the villa or the museum: check them.

  Our editors' tip

  In the park look for the exedra dedicated to Health, now fenced by a railing, with the sculptural group of Hebe pouring a drink for Jupiter, and the Scottish lodge near the rear entrance. Donato II Silva had the largest telescope ever seen in Lombardy until then installed on the terrace of the turret, made by the optician François de Baillou.

• Chiesa di Sant'Eusebio da Vercelli

  The little church of Sant'Eusebio is an ancient church in the Sant'Eusebio district of Cinisello, once at the centre of the original rural settlement, which from the second half of the twelfth century is thought to have moved a mile further south. It is the oldest place of worship in the territory of Cinisello and of Balsamo.

  What to see

  Some stone finds from the late pagan period show that the area was used for burials as early as the fourth century, and a Christian country oratory is said to have risen here later. There are no documents on its foundation: according to Luciano Caramel it should be sought between the late tenth and early eleventh century. The church is dedicated to Saint Eusebius, bishop of Vercelli, and is cited in Goffredo da Bussero's Liber notiziae sanctorum Mediolani, of 1298. In 1567 Leonetto Clivone, on a pastoral visit for Charles Borromeo, described it in very poor condition, closed and without a ceiling, but with a great crowd of the faithful on Easter Day; in 1612 Federico Borromeo ordered the altar and walls to be redone, forbidding services until the work was finished, and in 1670 it was enlarged with the sacristy. It stands outside the built-up area along the road to Nova Milanese and was built of poor materials: a rectangular hall with an apse, oriented.

  Around 1879 the parish priest of Sant'Ambrogio, Vitaliano Rossi, began major restorations: he reopened the two Romanesque windows of the apse, restored the painted figures on the left wall, enlarged the sacristy, raised a small bell tower with a clock and two bells and added the neoclassical porch on the façade. The works brought to light the original epigraph of Marcellinus and the decoration of the apse plinth, with a fish, a rooster, a serpent and plant motifs. Among the frescoes are a Madonna of the Milk surrounded by a Crucifixion, of the fourteenth-fifteenth century, a seventeenth-century Saint Dorothy and the nineteenth-century Saints Liberata and Lucy.

  Visiting

  The little church is in the Sant'Eusebio district, north of the centre of Cinisello. The sources consulted give no opening hours or visiting arrangements: check with the parish.

  Our editors' tip

  If you are told that here Queen Theodelinda had the dream that led her to become a Christian and to build the cathedral of Monza, or that a secret passage links the little church to the cathedral, know that according to the sources the legend is entirely unfounded: the church was built of poor, salvaged materials.

• Chiesa parrocchiale di San Martino Vescovo

  The church of San Martino Vescovo is a Catholic building in Cinisello Balsamo, on piazza Soncino, which faces Villa Casati Stampa. It is the main church of the Balsamo district and has taken over the parish role from the old sanctuary of San Martino.

  What to see

  It was built to cope with the population growth of the nineteen fifties, when the old church was no longer big enough for the new faithful. The parish priest don Piero Carcano chose the land on piazza Soncino, in a more central position; the design was by the engineer Claudio Latocca with the architects Olgiati and Sartorio, and the work was supported by collections and gifts of gold from the faithful. On 3 March 1957 Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, Archbishop of Milan, laid the first stone; the church was blessed on 19 March 1961 by Monsignor Mario Civelli, a missionary bishop in China of Balsamo origin, and consecrated on 3 June of the same year. The plan also included a bell tower and a parish activities centre linked by a portico, never built.

  It is a single compact block of reinforced concrete and exposed brick, with a Latin-cross plan, one large nave and a rhythm of pillars painted mustard colour; it seats eight hundred, with room for a thousand standing, plus two hundred in the crypt. On the walls are the Way of the Cross by the painter Compagnone and six paintings on the life of Saint Martin of Tours by Magdalena Grandi; above the altar, the Christ Pantocrator painted in 1999 by Sergio Giannini. In the left aisle, with the statues of Saint Rita of Cascia, Saint Anthony of Padua, Saint Joseph and Padre Pio, is the urn of Blessed Carino da Balsamo.

  Visiting

  The church is on piazza Soncino, about half a kilometre north-east of the old sanctuary. The sources consulted give no opening hours or visiting arrangements: check with the parish.

  Our editors' tip

  On the boundary wall of the churchyard is the fresco «Amore, arte e ragione» (Love, Art and Reason), donated to the parish in 2007 by Mike Ciafaloni: Christ nailed to a fruit tree and Saint Martin helping the suffering people, with the inscription «Il frutto dell'amore è la salvezza dell'umanità» (The fruit of love is the salvation of humanity).

• Chiesa parrocchiale di Sant'Ambrogio

  The parish church of Sant'Ambrogio, patron and protector of Cinisello, is the main church of Cinisello Balsamo and overlooks the broad piazza Gramsci. A first parish church was built here at the end of the fifteenth century; the present one is the result of successive rebuildings.

  What to see

  After the founding of a new settlement around today's piazza Gramsci, at the end of the fifteenth century a new parish church was built, raised on an embankment to protect it from standing water: it had two aisles, no bell tower and was surrounded by the cemetery, and the priests who said Mass still came from Desio. After a plague that hit the town hard a complete rebuilding was decided, entrusted to the architect Giovanni Battista Guida Bombarda and finished in 1644. Between 1724 and 1727 the church was lengthened and at last received its bell tower; around 1840 the architect Giacomo Moraglia gave it three aisles.

  The following year Carlo Farina was commissioned to paint a cycle of frescoes on the life of Saint Ambrose: only five were done, and the cycle was completed in 1905 by David Beghè, who also made the two medallions on the vault. The present appearance is due to the remodelling of the nineteen sixties wanted by don Massimo Pecora, who added the two side wings to the original body, remade the interiors, built the crypt and the penitentiary, rebuilt the altar and had a large polychrome window by Leonardo Spreafico made behind the apse. In 2010 the restoration of the façade was completed, which took on a pinkish tone.

  Visiting

  The church is on piazza Gramsci, in the centre of Cinisello Balsamo. The sources consulted give no opening hours or visiting arrangements: check with the parish.

  Our editors' tip

  The bell chime is made up of five bells in B2, cast at Varese in 1841 by the Felice Bizzozero foundry; the third, which had cracked, was recast two years later by the same foundry. The ringing is fully automated, and in 2009 the bells and bell tower were restored.

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