Gradella

The rural village of Gradella (CR), in Pandino’s Municipality, has some characteristic houses painted in yellow with a framework of red bricks. In Gradella the houses have some common courtyards and the wood and the bricks are the main construction materials used to build them. This village in the Po Plain is extremely poetic, a “little ancient village” so different from the modern blocks of houses or the supermarkets.
Here it is not possible to build modern buildings, you are allowed only to safeguard the existing ones with their specific characteristics: the wooden doors and windows, the rural plasters and the coatings.  
Through the wonderful main avenue which goes to Gradella, in a landscape full of ponds and channels, the visitor can find the church and then the graveyard (just outside of the village) with a little and nice chapel located on the place where there was in the past the isolation hospital built in 1630, during the plague. It is worth a visit especially Maggi Villa which already existed in the 18th Century and then became the House of the Lord: for this reason it is painted in red with a yellow framework (the opposite of all the other houses) and it is surrounded by a big garden.
In Gradella you can find the old typical landscape of the countryside, with the farms, the trees, the old haylofts, the inn, the green nuances of a small village where the poplar, the blackbird and the river live all together. Here you enjoy the silence, the warm climate and the sweet sounds of the fields. Gardella is only few kilometers far from Pandino and from the Visconti Castle which is the best maintained among the castles built of the Lord of Milan in the 14th Century.