A king was shot dead beside his own park

A palace of viceroys ends in an expiatory chapel

Beneath your shoes there is no bedrock worth the name — only the slow arithmetic of a drowned basin. The unit mapped here is Pliocene clay, laid down roughly 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago, mostly clay with minor sand, conglomerate and limestone. It belongs to a thicker package of Cenozoic sedimentary rocks accumulated between about 23 and 2.6 million years ago, the fill of the Po foredeep that sank as the Alps rose and shed themselves southward. Later, glacial meltwaters and the Lambro built the terraces of gravel and silt that Monza actually sits on (period context). It is soft, fertile, workable ground — which is exactly why aristocrats built pleasure-villas here rather than fortresses.

Two hundred metres from you, on the banks of that same Lambro, stands the Royal Villa of Monza, a neoclassical palace raised by the Habsburgs in the eighteenth century as a private residence during Austrian rule, surrounded by the Monza Park — one of the largest enclosed parks in Europe. It changed masters as fast as northern Italy did: residence of the viceroy under Napoleon's Kingdom of Italy, then under the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, and finally a Savoy property once the Kingdom of Italy absorbed Lombardy. The court, the stables, the avenues cut through the park — all of it is the physical residue of three successive foreign or dynastic regimes trying to look permanent.

It stopped being a royal home on a summer evening. On 29 July 1900, while attending the closing ceremony of a gymnastics club, King Umberto I was shot three or four times by the Italian anarchist Gaetano Bresci and died within minutes. Bresci had returned from America explicitly to avenge the Bava Beccaris massacre of 1898, when the army fired on a food riot in Milan; Umberto had already been attacked in 1879 and 1898. The royal family abandoned the Villa afterwards. Today it holds exhibitions, and one wing houses Monza's Artistic High School — teenagers with portfolios walking corridors built for viceroys.

A hundred paces from the killing ground, in Via Matteo da Campione, stands the answer to it: the Expiatory Chapel, commissioned by Umberto's son Vittorio Emanuele III from the elderly architect Giuseppe Sacconi and completed by his pupil Guido Cirilli in 1910. Obelisk-like crosses rise from a stone body, crowned with bronze Savoy emblems, and a Pietà by Lodovico Pogliaghi sits over the door. Only one other monument in Europe does quite this job — the Chapelle expiatoire in Paris, atoning for the execution of Louis XVI. Standing between palace and chapel, you are in a two-hundred-metre corridor that runs from absolutism to its violent end.

Merchant families build villas near the royal grounds

The same clay terrace carries a belt of bourgeois and noble villas that grew up in the Villa's gravitational field. On Piazza Citterio, roughly six hundred metres off, is Villa Carminati-Ferrario, built in 1830 to designs by the architect Pietro Pestagalli in a late neoclassical manner. Its U-shaped plan wraps an internal courtyard — the taste of prosperous merchant families of the period — and Girolamo Rusca's reliefs of the Four Seasons run across a strictly symmetrical façade, with two palm trees in the small front garden. A little further east stands Villa Archinto Pennati, a neoclassical rural palace that once sat outside the town proper and is now swallowed by it.

Monza also commemorated its own.

Newsreels record engines roaring through a royal park

What the archives do carry is the twentieth-century afterlife of this landscape, and it is overwhelmingly about the park and the engines in it. Cinecittà's newsreels preserve an "Automotive carousel" at Monza in 1959 and a car race in 1963; the autodrome was laid inside the royal hunting park in the 1920s, so the noise you may hear on a race weekend is travelling across grounds enclosed for Habsburg and Napoleonic deer. A 1986 documentary on "Monza — il parco" records the park itself as the subject rather than the backdrop, and a 1951 censorship file for a film called "Lotteria di Monza" survives in the Cineteca di Bologna. Photographic surveys of Monza held by the Martin Luther University's art-history institute round out the visual record.