Palazzo Simoni Fe

The grandest facade on via Contrizio belongs to Palazzo Simoni Fe, a noble house layered from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Inside wait a votive fresco by il Fiamminghino, a Vulcan forging at his forge, portraits of Alexander the Great and a picture gallery of more than forty works given to the village.

Why it matters

Every iron town has one palace that shows where the money went, and in Bienno it is the Simoni Fe complex. Its oldest core grew from a fifteenth-to-sixteenth-century building through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before the symmetric nineteenth-century front that now defines the street. After years of neglect the palace was restored — the second floor in 2013, the whole complex in 2021 — and reopened as a house of culture where local artists keep workshops. The pinacoteca, donated by Archbishop Morandini, hangs throughout the Renaissance and Baroque residence, creating a small museum of painting above the lanes of the borgo.

What to notice

The via Contrizio elevation bears a large votive fresco by il Fiamminghino. The nineteenth-century symmetric front has three orders of windows with sandstone cornices and wrought-iron railings with circular motifs, a reading confirmed by the Lombardy region's catalogue, which also describes the complex's L-shaped plan and its three floors plus attic. Inside, the sequence is unusually theatrical. A hall covered by six cross vaults resting on paired columns leads to the granite staircase, flanked by three great portraits narrating the deeds of Alexander the Great; overhead, Vulcan forges armour inside his grotto, helped by the Cyclopes. The first-floor salone holds period furnishings and family portraits of the Simoni, and its ceiling carries the Gloria of Tasso with Fame and Envy. Along the corridor are painted sentries wearing the Simoni crest on their helmets. Three seventeenth-century sandstone fireplaces, each bearing the family crest on the keystone, survive between the palace and the municipal library. Of the wooden sculpture group — a Dead Christ, the Annunciate and the Archangel Gabriel — the tourism page dates the figures to the fifteenth century, brought here from the Maddalena hill and the Pihìne shrine.

Context and history

The Simoni were one of the leading families of Bienno's iron aristocracy, and the palace tracked their rise: a late medieval house, enlarged in the 1600s and 1700s, given the present facade in the 1800s. It remained a noble residence until 1935, when Countess Paolina Fe D'Ostiani converted it into a nursery school, a use that lasted until 2001, after which the building stood empty and deteriorating. From 2012 the municipality brought it back to life as a venue for artists and exhibitions, and the restorations of 2013 and 2021 made the rooms safe and visitable again. Since 2016 the palace has housed the pinacoteca that Archbishop Morandini donated to the Comune: a collection of more than forty works, among them frescoed views of the borgo, the snowy Maddalena hill and scenes of country life in classical taste, distributed through the rooms of the palace. The regional catalogue records the building today as public property, hosting a sisters' residence, apartments and the municipal library in its rear wings.