Monza's cathedral was founded, tradition says, by the Lombard queen Theodelinda around 595, and its treasury still guards the object that made the town a royal stage: the Corona Ferrea, a slender gold and jeweled circlet built around a thin iron band that legend holds was forged from a nail of the Crucifixion.
Kings from Charlemagne to Napoleon Bonaparte were crowned with it as King of Italy, the last coronation in 1805. In Theodelinda's own chapel, the Zavattari family covered the walls in 1444 with a fresco cycle of 45 scenes from her life, painted in the courtly, gold-heavy style known as International Gothic. The striped marble facade outside, added between the 1300s and 1600s, mixes Gothic tracery with a later Baroque portal.
