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| Crespi d'Adda - World Heritage Listed village |
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Crespi d'Adda, in the municipality of Capriate San Gervasio, is certainly the most improtant example of a workers’ village in Italy, both due to the perfect state of repair and the exemplarity of the town plan. The Crespis, a family of weavers, began their activity here in 1878, knowing that in this area there was a large workforce available and seeing the possibility of building an industrial canal along the Adda river to take advantage of its hydraulic power. This was the period of the great entrepreneurs, who were factory owners and philanthropists at one and the same time, inspired by a social doctrine in which the workers’ lives continued around the factory. Cristoforo Crespi, the founder, built the so-called "palasòcc", but when his son Silvio, educated in England, arrived, he made a plan for the whole village. The principle was to give everyone a small house, with a garden and vegetable patch and provide the necessary services, from public baths to a school, from a church to a sports field, from a working men’s club to a small hospital. Then there was the theatre, the grocer’s, the fire brigade, the wash-house, the band, the summer camp, the course in home economics... All supported by Silvio Crespi, an exceptional figure of entrepreneur and a headstrong politician. The town-planning scheme is simple: along the river there is the factory with its very high chimneys and alongside the castle-villa of the owners. The workers’ houses are arranged along several parallel streets, to the south there is a group of later villas, built for white-collar employees and executives. At the entrance to the town there is the church and next to it the school. The church, in neo-Renaissance style, reproduces St. Mary of Busto Arsizio. The other buildings are all in the neo-medieval style, of which Lombard Romanticism was fond, richly decorated with terracotta tiles and wrought iron. The views of the factory, the castle and the hydro-electric power station, a gem of industrial archaeology which is still functioning, are exquisite. The cemetery is a National Monument and is dominated by the Crespi mausoleum, a pyramid-tower of “ceppo dell’Ada” stone, decorated in eclectic and Art Nouveau styles.  The fifth site in the world included for industrial archaeology, the Workers’ Village of Crespi has now joined the other protected Italian sites (the rock art in Val Camonica – the church with the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan with “The Last Supper” by Leonardo da Vinci – the old centre of Rome – the cultural heritage of the Vatican – the old centre of Florence – Venice and its lagoon - Piazza del Duomo in Pisa – the old centre of San Giminiano – the Sassi of Matera - Vicenza and the Palladian villas – the old centre of Naples – the old centre of Siena – the Renaissance city of Ferrara – the fortress of Frederisk II in Castel del Monte – the “trulli” of Alberobello – the first Christian monuments in Ravenna; - the old centre of the Renaissance city of Pienza). |