The name of Collegno is a measurement: it comes from Collegium ad quintum milium, the posting station five thousand paces from Turin, and two thousand years ago the town began exactly like that, as a change of horses on the road over the Mont Cenis towards France. Two utopias have lived here since. The first is Savoyard: the Certosa Reale, the monastery willed in the seventeenth century with designs by Juvarra, became in 1853 the asylum of Turin, and its nineteenth-century pavilions made it one of the largest psychiatric institutions in Italy — it was here that the case of the amnesiac of Collegno played out, which held Italy's breath. Today the boundary wall is gone and the site is a cultural park.
The second utopia is industrial: the Villaggio Leumann, the garden city that the Swiss industrialist Napoleone Leumann had Pietro Fenoglio build for his textile workers, with cottages, a church, a boarding house, a canteen, a school and an art nouveau station — a preserved one-off. Between 30 April and 1 May 1945 the retreating Germans slaughtered sixty-eight people here and at Grugliasco. On the Dora, where medieval irrigation channels still water the gardens of the agricultural park, with the metro tying it to Turin, Collegno is a suburb that has managed to become social history worth visiting.
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📅 Every year, on the third Sunday of July
Collegno celebrates Saint Lawrence on the third Sunday of July; his church holds 18th-century sculptures by the Turin sculptor Stefano Maria Clemente, while the town's Charterhouse, turned into an asylum in 1853, was at the centre of the famous «Smemorato di Collegno» case.
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 Collegno, but an easy day trip away.
