The village owes its shape to Cardinal Branda Castiglioni, who in the fifteenth century brought Tuscan masons and Tuscan ideas here: he rebuilt the stronghold beside the collegiate church of Santi Stefano e Lorenzo and in the same decade began the church itself, the baptistery and the Santissimo Corpo di Cristo. In 1423 he founded the Scolastica, a free school of rhetoric and song for some eighty children; that building, on the climb to the collegiate church, is now the town hall. The comune holds the title of city for artistic merit.
The baptistery probably began as a family chapel inside the dismantled castle, raised, it seems, on one of its towers: there Masolino da Panicale frescoed the Stories of Saint John the Baptist in 1435, and there Brunelleschian perspective was used for the first time in Lombardy. Masolino had already worked for Branda in Rome, at San Clemente. The stronghold was short-lived: early in the following century troops of Massimiliano Sforza pulled it down, after a sack that stripped the collegiate church and the baptistery too.
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📅 Every year, on 7 October
On 7 October Castiglione Olona celebrates its patron, the Blessed Virgin Mary of the Rosary; the town is also known for the Palio dei Castelli, contested since 1971 among the borough's eight districts.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Castiglione Olona, but an easy day trip away.
