CHURCH OF SAINT SIGISMUND 

The church 

Entrusted to the Gerolomini monks in the mid-fifteenth century and rebuilt from June 20, 1463 with the laying of the first stone, still visible from the first chapel on the right entering. The church was designed by Bianca Maria Visconti in memory of her marriage to Francesco Sforza in 1441 in the original church already dedicated by the friars of Vallombrosa to S. Sigismund. The building of the church ended in 1492. 

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The church, with a single Albertian type nave and side chapels, was frescoed from 1535 and represents one of the most significant decorative complex of the fifteenth century Mannerism of North Italy, which was stylistically harmonious and organic despite the intervention of different artists (Camillo Bocaccino, Giulio Campi, Bernardino Campi, Bernardino Gatti, Antonio Campio and others). Besides the pictorial route of the apse, choir, transepts and nave, there are several notable altarpieces and pictorial decorations of the twelve side chapels. 

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The sixteenth-century stuccoes of the chapels, the wrought iron gates, the wrought iron and brass gates, the wooden choir, the choir (16th-17th centuries) and the eighteenth-century marble inlays of the high altar are also noteworthy. The organ was manufactured by Luigi Vincenzo Acerbis in 1861 with the reuse of the pipes of the previous instrument designed by Giovanni Francesco Maineri in 1567. It is placed in a fifteenth century wooden case over the left side of the choir looking at the altar. No less valuable is the pictorial decoration of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, started by Camillo Gavasetti in 1625 and continued by Tommaso Aleni, that for the first time in Lombardy repropose the new iconography that Leonardo had designed for the Last Supper at the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. 

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Once the order of the Girolamini was suppressed in 1798 the church, already a parish one since 1774, remained so since until the installation of the cloistered Dominican nuns of the Monastery of St. Joseph on the 8th of December 2007 and coming from Fontanellato (PR). The church and the complex are back to their original destination as a monastery.