Monza and its hidden art, in via Italia: the “Lotto Gotico”

Dear readers, who during these December weeks will frantically walk across the city centre, dazzled by the lights of the shop window in search for the last minute Christmas presents.. This call is for you: whenever you are in via Italia- at the very start, with the fountain at your back- immediately after the well known bookshop.. there, slow down, get your mind off the anxiety for Christmas presents and look up towards your right.

Exactly there, in the screen of buildings which flanks the street, hidden for the people who are in a hurry but actually clearly visible, there is a tiny house that dates back to the medieval times- and is thus one of the oldest ones in town. But pay attention: it actually is a house, and not a portion of it.. by seeing it, with two floors but packed between the adjoining buildings, with two little windows, could reasonably seem a remnant of a bigger house gone with the centuries passed by. It isn’t; It is a real house, called “Lotto Gotico” (“gothic lot” in English). In other words, it’s a typical medieval house imbedded in a row of houses, the façade of wich is narrow overlooking the principal street, developed in height and depth. On the ground floor we imagine that there was a workshop of a craftsman, on the first floor the actual home and in the back a garden. In “Ici” times (by now I should say “Imu”) don’t let the ratable calculation tempt you: I guess the family which lived there mustn’t have had a comfortable life.