Gemonio

In an eighteenth-century courtyard of the old centre, a village of not even three thousand inhabitants keeps sculptures by Medardo Rosso, Arturo Martini, Giacomo Manzù and Lucio Fontana, and graphic works by Fernand Léger, Henry Moore, Georges Rouault and Graham Sutherland. It is the Floriano Bodini municipal museum, born of the donation by the sculptor whose name it bears and grown around his corpus of plasters, bronzes, marbles and medals; the attached library holds more than five thousand titles, with particular attention to the sculptors and painters of Existential Realism.

The rest of Gemonio is older and smaller in scale: the church of San Pietro, Romanesque and a national monument, was the old parish church; in the new one, dedicated to San Rocco and the Beata Vergine Addolorata, there is a Mascioni organ of 1905 with pneumatic action, which can still be heard in concerts. In the municipal arms, in use since the nineteen-twenties, there is a tree: it stands for the chestnut groves, which were everywhere here. Every two years the four quarters — Martitt, Piazza, San Pietro and Mirabella — compete in the palio. Two thousand eight hundred and eighty-three inhabitants in the province of Varese.