Other Painted Villages

A few kilometres from each other, lie another two painted villages of recent construction: San Fermo, a neighbourhood of the town of Varese, and Olona, a hamlet near the town of Induno Olona. In around 1999, encouraged by an art review that is organised every year in the month of July by the Association Friends of San Fermo, the town of Varese decided to brighten up the stone walls and courtyards of San Fermo with some frescoes by famous contemporary artists such as Claudio Cargioli, Giovanni De Maria, Carlo Adelio Galimberti, Alberto Venditti, Antonio Pedretti, and Marco Severo. With a similar intention, the administration of Induno Olona of that time started the project "Olona borgo d'arte" (Olona, art village), which was inaugurated on 27 October 2002 and involved 12 contemporary artists who had links to Varese Province; the artists were Mario Alioli, Enrico Brunella, Enzo Capozza and Maria Rita Fedeli, Vittorio Frattini, Silvio Monti, Maria Teresa Gonzàlez Ramirez, Albino Reggiori, Gianni Robusti, Claudio Rubino, Gianluigi Sommaruga, Giorgio Vicentini, and Anna Maria Vitale. Each of them chose to depict different subjects, related to the theme of the Magi, to whom the small church in Olona is dedicated. Some of them chose to use different techniques from frescoes, as in the case of Albino Reggiori, who produced an "Inlay work" of fragments of enamel ceramics, and Giorgio Vicentini, who used cardboard and wood for his work-provocation entitled "Study in Olona".