A Lombard town on the Olona north-west of Milan, where the communes of the Lombard League beat Frederick I Barbarossa in 1176 — and which Italy later made a byword for resistance.
Legnano lies about twenty kilometres north-west of Milan, on the Olona, which runs straight through the middle of the town and divides it into two nearly equal halves. In the twelfth century this was the northern edge of the Milanese contado: farmland, watermills and a scatter of fortified houses on the road running up towards the Alpine passes and the empire beyond them.
On 29 May 1176 the militias of the Lombard League defeated the army of the Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa near the town. The Battle of Legnano did not end the war by itself, but it ended the emperor’s attempt to hold northern Italy by force, and the peace that followed at Venice and then at Constance conceded to the communes most of what they had fought for.
The Olona made Legnano. It was a modest river but a steady one, and the fall of water through the town turned mills: by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seventeen could be counted along it, and that inheritance of water power is what later made Legnano an industrial textile town rather than a farming village. The same river was a nuisance as well as an asset, prone to flooding, and it is now largely confined through the built-up area by embankments and diversion channels.
The medieval settlement was guarded by the castle of the Cotta, built in the tenth century and pulled down in the thirteenth or fourteenth. It was one of the Lombard League’s military outposts at the time of the battle. On its site stands the Castello Visconteo, the Visconti castle that succeeded it, which in April 1273 lodged Edward I of England and Eleanor of Castile on their way home from crusade — a reminder that this was a stop on a much-travelled road, not a backwater.
The engagement is placed on the plain around the town, where the League’s infantry formed up around the carroccio — the ox-drawn wagon carrying the commune’s standard and altar, which served both as a rallying point and as the thing an army could not honourably abandon. The imperial cavalry broke the Milanese horse and then failed against that infantry square, and the day turned.
Legnano preserves no battlefield. There is no protected field, no excavated site and no monument on identifiable ground: the plain has been built over by the industrial and residential growth of the last two centuries, and what survives of 1176 in the town is commemoration rather than terrain. Visitors looking for the battle find statues, a basilica and a festival, and no ground to walk.
Legnano stayed in Milan’s orbit, passing with the contado to Visconti and then Sforza rule, and its principal monument belongs to that later world rather than to the battle. The basilica of San Magno was built between 1504 and 1513 in a Renaissance design commonly attributed to Donato Bramante, with a bell tower added between 1752 and 1791; Pius XII named it a minor basilica in 1950.
That chronology is worth stating plainly, because it is easy to assume a town famous for a medieval battle is a medieval town. Legnano’s most prominent church post-dates the battle by more than three centuries, and its castle is a Visconti rebuilding of a demolished tenth-century one.
In the nineteenth century Legnano was taken up by the Risorgimento as proof that Italians had once combined and beaten a German emperor. Giuseppe Garibaldi called in 1862 for a memorial; a first statue by Egidio Pozzi was replaced in 1900 by the Monument to the Warrior of Legnano by Enrico Butti, which still stands. Amos Cassioli’s vast canvas of 1870 belongs to the same movement of feeling.
The clearest measure of that status is the national anthem, which names only two places: Rome and Legnano. The line "Dall’Alpi a Sicilia dovunque è Legnano" makes the town a byword for resistance anywhere in the peninsula. Since 1935 the Palio di Legnano has been run each spring in commemoration, and 29 May, the date of the battle, is the regional holiday of Lombardy.