Patron saint festival In 27 days
Feast of Saint Martin of Tours
📅 Every year, on 11 November
On 11 November Palestro celebrates its patron Saint Martin of Tours, to whom the town's church is dedicated.
On 30 and 31 May 1859, here, the Franco-Piedmontese army won its first victory over the Austrians in the Second War of Independence. Since then the name of this village of fewer than two thousand people has been written on street signs across half of Italy: there are squares and streets called Palestro everywhere, and the one in Milan made the news on 27 July 1993, when the Cosa nostra car bomb went off there. A man from Trentino, Domenico Bassetti, even called Palestro a town he founded in French Algeria, settled at first by Italian colonists: today it is called Lakhdaria.
Before the battle Palestro was a border village and a village of pilgrims: it is a stage of the via Francigena in the Lomellina, and the first document naming it is from 999, when Otto III gave it to the bishop of Vercelli. On 29 September 1614 Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy had it burned in revenge for the burning of Caresana. The dead of 1859 are looked after by the ossuary monument, inaugurated in 1893, and every last Sunday in May the battle is re-enacted in costume. The municipal coat of arms, on the other hand, has never had a decree: the village simply uses it.
🎉 Festivals and feasts in Palestro 1
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Near Palestro
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
