Mirasole Abbey was founded as a monastery of the Humiliati in the first half of the 13th century. Its economy was based on the working of wool and the production of woollen cloth.
The Humiliati were abolished in 1571, and the abbey became the property of the Collegio Elvetico in Milan, which was taken over for the use of the Austrian administration in 1786 (the building is now the Palazzo del Senato); its spiritual life was administered by the Olivetans. In 1797, the former abbey was given to the Ospedale Maggiore of Milan.
In 2013 a community of Premonstratensian canons moved into the former abbey premises as the Priorato San Norberto, a priory of Mondaye Abbey in France.
The rectangular layout includes a church and cloisters. The buildings were once surrounded by a moat, towers and a drawbridge. One entrance led towards the country, the other into the city. The church, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, was constructed in the 14th and 15th centuries. It contains a fresco of the Assumption of the Virgin by an anonymous master of 1460, linked to the school of Michelino da Besozzo.
References:The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.