At Ispra the Joint Research Centre of the European Union takes up about a third of the municipal territory. Inside it, between 1957 and 1958, the first Italian research reactor was built, called ISPRA-1, and it stayed in service until 1973. Before research the village lived on lime: the limestone was torn from the flanks of the hills and burnt in kilns raised on the lakeshore, so that the barges could load it on the spot and carry it to Milan by water. The last kiln closed in 1960.
The name, according to a sixteenth-century explanation by Gaudenzio Merula, would come from the harshness of the rocks, and the first time it appears in a document is on a parchment of the year 826. The parish church of San Martino, moreover, is really a double one: two adjoining churches with opposite plans, communicating with each other through the flanks of their apses, their fronts turned one to the west, towards Lake Maggiore, and the other to the east, towards the square.
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📅 Every year, on 11 November
Ispra celebrates Saint Martin of Tours on 11 November, in the church dedicated to him. The town holds Villa Quassa, where General Luigi Cadorna spent his childhood.
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 Ispra, but an easy day trip away.
