Brescia’s Castello, perched high on the Colle Cidneo in the city centre, lost its defensive function long ago. The castle is a city park nowadays, where one can go for a stroll or enjoy a panoramic view of Lombardy’s second city. On the premises we also find several museums and…
It must have been one of the most beautiful buildings in Colonia Civica Augusta Brixia: the Capitolium of the town, i.e. the temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva on the northern side of the Roman forum. When the first excavations were launched at this spot in 1823, only one column…
If there is one thing I have discovered about Brescia, then it must be that it is a great city to go for a stroll. And that is exactly what I am going to do in this post: present my readers with a written stroll through the centre of Brescia.…
As Brescia’s municipal museum, the Museo di Santa Giulia is all about the city’s own history. In part 4 of this series about the museum, I will take stock of several museum objects and use them to discuss the history of Brescia. Brescia in Antiquity is the main subject of…
Part 3 of the series about the Museo di Santa Giulia in Brescia is dedicated to the nuns’ choir (Coro delle Monache), which has been built against the eighth century church of San Salvatore. Construction of the choir was closely related to reforms within the Benedictine Order in the fifteenth…
In the second part of this series about the Museo di Santa Giulia in Brescia I will discuss the oratory of Santa Maria in Solario. This square edifice dates from the twelfth century and was built in the Romanesque style. Its splendid octagonal dome with colonnades just below the eaves…
The Museo di Santa Giulia is Brescia’s municipal museum. It can be found in the enormous monastic complex of San Salvatore-Santa Giulia, which in 2011 was added to UNESCO’s list of world heritage as one of the seven Longobard Places of Power.[1] It should not come as a surprise that…
The history of the church of Santa Maria della Carità is closely connected to the Brescian noblewoman Laura Gambara (ca. 1490-1549). She spent a large part of her life tending to the needs of vulnerable women. And there were plenty of vulnerable women to protect, for the years after the…
The church of Santa Maria delle Grazie and the adjacent eponymous sanctuary (santuario) are of great importance to the citizens of Brescia. It was in the sanctuary that a certain Giovanni Battista Montini, just 22 years old and only recently ordained a priest, celebrated his first mass in 1920. In…
We left the church of the Most Sacred Body of Christ and followed a path leading up the slope of the Colle Cidneo. After less than 300 metres, we had already reached the next church that was on our list, that of San Pietro in Oliveto, or Saint Peter in…
The church of the Most Sacred Body of Christ can be counted among the most intriguing in all of Brescia. It is one of the very few churches in the city that has kept some of its Gothic elements. Because its name is so long, it is frequently abbreviated to…
The church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli has perhaps the most beautiful facade of all the churches in Brescia. Especially the loggia that protrudes forward is simply splendid. The name of the church derives from an icon of the Virgin which was said to have worked miracles during a plague…
The spot where we nowadays find the Duomo Nuovo was occupied by the summer cathedral of San Pietro since the fifth or sixth century. Next to it stood the winter cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore, which was replaced with the Duomo Vecchio, also known as La Rotonda, in the eleventh…
The three buildings stand side by side along the Piazza Paolo VI in Brescia: the old Duomo, the new Duomo and the Palazzo Broletto, the seat of the comune during the Middle Ages with its imposing, 54-metre-high Torre del Pegol. This post is about the Duomo Vecchio, whose official name…
According to tradition, Faustinus and Jovita were two brothers from Brescia who were martyred during the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrianus (117-138). However, the ‘Acts’ describing their lives were only written much later and are exceptionally unreliable. Apparently this did not prevent the two brothers from becoming patron saints…
The church of Santi Nazaro e Celso is dedicated to two fairly obscure martyrs, Nazarius and Celsus. According to tradition, it was Saint Ambrosius of Milan (ca. 340-397) who dug up their relics in the cemetery surrounding the Basilica Apostolorum, a church he had founded. This basilica was later renamed…
The church of Sant’Alessandro, located at the intersection of the Via Moretto and the Corso Cavour, was not mentioned in any of our travel guides. Fortunately it was mentioned on a free map of the city that had been given to us by the staff of the local tourist information…
The Duomo Museum was opened to the public in 1953. My travel guide to Milan and the Lakes (2010) claimed the museum was closed for renovation, but it seems to have reopened in 2013. Although it is not as impressive as, for instance, the Duomo Museum in Florence, the Museo…
It took us at least an hour and a half to get inside the Duomo. Security measures were pretty tight and there was an awfully long queue outside the cathedral. Soldiers in combat fatigues with machine guns were patrolling the streets and guarding the Duomo, one of Milan’s most famous…
The San Gottardo in Corte is a small church near the Duomo of Milan. It was built as a chapel between 1330 and 1336, on the orders of Azzone Visconti, who was Lord of Milan from 1329 until his death in 1339. It was originally part of the Palazzo del…