The rural village of Gradella (CR), in the Municipality of Pandino, features characteristic houses painted in yellow, with red brick profiles and connecting courtyards; the porticoed fronts, the ornamental pattern of the pilasters in exposed brick and the wood as construction material that goes with the brick make this village a poetic limb of the Po Valley - a "small world" that resists the invasion of the warehouses, condominiums and hypermarkets.

Construction expansion is not possible here.Only the recovery of the existing heritage, safeguarding the traditional construction criteria: the roofing of the tiles, the wooden windows, the earthy range of the plaster, the rustic coverings.

After crossing the splendid tree-lined avenue that leads to Gradella, in a landscape of springs, reclaimed marshes and canals, visitors come to a parish church and cemetery just outside the town with a small and charming chapel that sits on the place where the lazaretto was built during the plague of 1630. Above all seventeenth century Villa Maggi which owes its current appearance to subsequent modifications once it became the master's house.

It was painted in red, with yellow borders (unlike all the other houses) and surrounded by a large garden. But whoever comes here must see the countryside as it once was, with the rows of trees, farmhouses, old barns, village taverns and the green plots of a Po Valley village where the poplar, the blackbird, the river coexist with the hidden modernity. The cool, fresh silence and the gentle noises of the fields lie only a few kilometres from Pandino and the Visconti castle which is the best preserved of the castles built by the lords of Milan in the fourteenth century.

BORGHI PIÙ BELLI D’ITALIA #INLOMBARDIA