Former Town Hall of Fontanelice

The old Town Hall of Fontanelice, together with the adjacent building, constitutes an L-shaped complex enclosing Piazza Roma on the southern side. The current building stands partly on the site of a former medieval castle, already documented in 554. During the Renaissance, the remaining parts of the castle were incorporated into the new public palace, marked today by an external loggia. 

The palace is the seat of the Giuseppe Mengoni Museum Archive, inaugurated in 2002 after extensive inventorying and cataloguing of the material as the result of a donation by Carlo Basile, the heir of the local architect to whom the exhibition is dedicated. The archive contains more than one thousand seven hundred design documents produced by the Milan studio of the architect Mengoni, the largest part of which consisting of project material, photographic, cartographic and written documentation, produced and used for the construction of Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, still considered among the most beautiful in the world. Such documentation ranges from the first drawings for the competition announced by the Municipality of Milan in 1861 for the "Arrangement of Piazza del Duomo and adjacent streets", to the executive drawings and true-to-life details destined for the various companies working on the gallery.