The parish church of San Michele Arcangelo is one of the most important places of worship in Busto Arsizio. It stands where the Lombards built a fortification and is named after the patron saint of that people and patron of the city; it has been a prepositural seat since 1924.
What to see
The present church was rebuilt to increase its capacity between 1653, when the first stone was laid on 25 March, and 1679 (the façade excepted), to a design by Francesco Maria Richini. Because the moat and bastions of the town prevented growth to the west, the orientation was reversed: the bell tower, formerly beside the apse, ended up on the flank of the façade. The façade, completed in 1796, is Baroque, gabled and divided into two bands by a high cornice: below, Ionic pilasters and the large portal between two marble half-columns, with a bas-relief roundel of the Madonna and Child; above, Corinthian pilasters and a rectangular window. A triangular pediment crowns it all, with four statues of Angels at the sides and Saint Michael the Archangel in the centre.
The bell tower is the only structure left from the Lombard fortification and the oldest building in Busto Arsizio: built of stone and pebbles, it is dated to the ninth or tenth century, and ends in four mullioned windows, two of them walled up. It was raised in two stages, the last in 1559 with the bell chamber. Inside, the plan is a Latin cross, with a single nave under a lunetted barrel vault and ten side chapels, five on each side: in the chapel of the Crucifix a wooden crucifix of the sixteenth century and a canvas of the late fifteenth attributable to the school of the Bergognone; in the chapel of Saint Felix and the Relics the saint's urn and reliquaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The frescoes of the dome, five hundred square metres on the triumph of Christ over death, date from the 1940s.
Visiting
The church is in the centre of Busto Arsizio, in piazzetta Don Pio Chieppi. Opening hours and visiting arrangements do not appear in the sources consulted: check with the parish.
Our editors' tip
A detail to keep in mind while looking at the bell tower: there were three bells at first, and since 1889 there have been twelve, cast in Milan by the Barigozzi foundry. After a restoration of the tower they no longer rest on its walls but on an internal metal structure that discharges directly onto the foundations.
