Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Cascina Linterno is located on the south-eastern edge of the Cave Park. It maintains a few cultivated fields around it which form a "drop" recognizable even on historical maps, in a context which sees the presence of some water meadows.

Entering the Cave Park from Cascina Linterno means suddenly leaving the city and entering the agricultural plot interwoven with fountains, tree-lined rows and water meadows. The urban fabric of Milan is adjacent to the farmhouse and the rural landscape but these two areas do not interfere with each other. Here calm and silence prevail, the change in rhythms and life cycles is perceived instantly.

Even today the building retains the structure highlighted in the nineteenth-century maps. The main entrance leads to the courtyard, of modest size and irregular shape but with a welcoming and pleasant atmosphere.

Until 2002 the farmhouse hosted cereal, livestock and horticultural activities, as evidenced by some stone placeholders from the ancient Verziere. Then the agricultural activity was abandoned, the surrounding fields assigned to an agricultural company that does not have its headquarters here and the building saw its intended use disappear. The visual link between the farmhouse and the rural environment, however, remains incisive and unmistakable.

Currently the interior, owned by the Municipality of Milan, is the only Milanese farmhouse to have, in addition to a monumental restriction, also a landscape one. This particular condition, which saved it from demolition and guarantees the intangibility of the rural landscape of the Cave Park, has materialized in the recent restoration works carried out by the Polytechnic of Milan.

The first information on Cascina Linterno appears in the so-called «Carta Investiture» of 1154, preserved in the rectory of the Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio. At that time the building was a grange - that is, a fortified rural settlement for the conservation of grain and seeds - and a place of hospitality along the Via Francigena for pilgrims who went to the Holy Land. It is said of the presence on site of Templar friars and Francesco Petrarca.

Between the 13th and 15th centuries the grangia, owned by the de Marliano family, experienced a period of great splendor. It was later enlarged with stables and porticoes which transformed it into a typical farmhouse with a closed courtyard. Between the 18th and 19th centuries other buildings grew up around the central nucleus of the farmhouse, making it a real rural village in which an inn and inn called "Osteria del Petrarca" was in vogue.

In the twenties and thirties of the last century, Don Giuseppe Gervasini lived and worked here, a priest with the skills of a demiurge and healer who, due to his abilities, became very popular as "el Pret de Ratanà" but, at the same time, was long hated by the ecclesiastical hierarchies.