Sondalo

Europe's largest sanatorium, before it took in a single patient, served as a hiding place for paintings. The sanatorium village of Sondalo was begun in 1932 and finished in 1940, but the war postponed its opening, and in those years the empty buildings were used to shelter from the bombing works of art removed from Brera and from other museums in Milan and Lombardy. The patients arrived only between 1946 and 1947. There are nine rationalist pavilions of nine storeys, six hundred thousand cubic metres built, some two thousand eight hundred beds, connected to one another by porphyry-paved roads and by internal cableways that carried food and linen from one building to the next.

Four thousand two hundred and thirty-seven inhabitants in the province of Sondrio, in the upper Valtellina. The town's sanatorium vocation had begun much earlier: in 1903 the local doctor Ausonio Zubiani had the first Italian altitude sanatorium built at Pineta di Sortenna, to a design by Giuseppe Ramponi, and in the nineteen-twenties the Abetina and the Vallesana followed. Four buildings in thirty years that tell the whole passage of Italian sanatorium architecture from Liberty to Déco to rationalism. From the nineteen-seventies, with antibiotics, the village became a general hospital.