Why you should experience Il Centro Arese in Milan, Italy.
Il Centro Arese is an expansive retail destination where Arese's Alfa Romeo inheritance, Lombard architectural references, large-scale commerce and twenty-first-century reinvention converge across part of the former industrial territory that transformed this once-small community.
Set along Via Giuseppe Eugenio Luraghi near Viale Alfa Romeo and just steps from Museo Alfa Romeo, the complex occupies part of the enormous industrial district where Alfa Romeo transferred production from Portello beginning in 1963, eventually employing almost 20,000 people and turning Arese into a company town whose physical growth became inseparable from automobile manufacturing. Timber structures, broad glazed surfaces and high pitched forms reinterpret the proportions and rooflines of traditional Lombard cascine at a scale large enough to contain an interior route approaching a kilometer in length. Daylight penetrates deep into the two-level interior, tempering the extraordinary dimensions of a project containing 200 commercial units across more than 90,000 square meters of leasable space. The result is a retail destination where the scale created by Arese's industrial past has been repurposed through architecture that deliberately reconnects the former factory territory with the agricultural building traditions that preceded it.
What you should know about Il Centro Arese.
Il Centro Arese is best known for converting part of the former Alfa Romeo industrial territory into what became Italy's largest shopping center constructed in a single development phase, completed in only two years and opened in April 2016. Finiper founder Marco Brunelli drove the €350 million project, adding another extraordinary chapter to a retail career that had begun alongside Bernardo Caprotti and Nelson Rockefeller during the creation of the company that became Esselunga before Brunelli founded Finiper in 1974. Davide Padoa of Design International, Michele De Lucchi and Arnaldo Zappa shaped a complex containing 200 shops, restaurants and cafés across 92,000 square meters of leasable area. De Lucchi drew architectural inspiration from the cascine of the Lombard countryside, translating their pitched roofs and extensive use of timber into a contemporary structure whose domestic references deliberately countered the enormous dimensions of the development. The interior commercial route extends almost one kilometer across two levels, an exceptional spatial consequence of developing on land previously occupied by sections of Alfa Romeo's sprawling factory. Within seven months of opening, the project won the 2016 MAPIC Award for Best New Shopping Centre in Cannes, finishing jointly with Wuhan Mall City after competing against developments including Mall of Scandinavia, Starfield Hanam and Westfield World Trade Center. Brunelli's investment, the architectural response to Lombard rural forms, the two-year construction campaign and rapid international recognition turned a vast piece of former manufacturing territory into a new commercial center for Northwest Milan.
The ground beneath the development carries an industrial history powerful enough to explain its exceptional scale. Alfa Romeo began transferring production from Milan's Portello district to Arese in 1963, with the Giulia becoming the first model produced there even as components initially continued arriving from the older factory. The new operation expanded until almost 20,000 people worked at Arese, producing a factory-city whose arrival accelerated the transformation of the surrounding community from a small settlement into an industrial suburb. Alfa Romeo subsequently commissioned an entirely new headquarters nearby, bringing architects Vito and Gustavo Latis together with Cassi Ramelli and structural specialists Leo Finzi and Edoardo Nova, with Pietro Porcinai responsible for the landscape. Their horizontally organized complex developed between 1966 and 1976 through modular office blocks connected by an elevated platform to the company museum and other structures, deliberately rejecting the corporate tower typology. Production decline eventually fractured that immense industrial world, leaving sections available for redevelopment and creating the physical conditions for Brunelli's commercial project decades later. Il Centro consequently represents neither an isolated suburban shopping development nor a simple reuse of vacant land, but the latest large-scale occupation of territory whose dimensions were established by one of Italy's most consequential automobile manufacturers.
How to fold Il Centro Arese into your trip.
Il Centro Arese works as the anchor for a daytime progression through Alfa Romeo's surviving corporate architecture, an eighteenth-century villa tied to Arese's landed history and a parish church that charts the community's expansion before and after industrialization.
Begin at Museo Alfa Romeo, where the company's Arese headquarters project gave automobile history a purpose-built architectural setting conceived as something more ambitious than a storage place for historic cars. Orazio Satta Puliga originated the idea, president Giuseppe Luraghi supported its realization and longtime Alfa designer Luigi Fusi assembled and restored the collection before Vito and Gustavo Latis developed an exhibition across six staggered levels around a central impluvium. The museum opened on December 18, 1976, closed in 2011 after the surrounding production and headquarters functions disappeared and returned in 2015 as Alfa Romeo renewed its connection with Arese. Continue to Villa La Valera, part of the older agricultural and aristocratic landscape that preceded the automobile complex and preserves the name of a settlement incorporated into Arese's historical territory. Valera was already associated with the oratory of San Bernardino by the sixteenth century, and the estate passed into the Marietti family in 1811, anchoring a rural community that remained distinct enough to become an autonomous parish in 1960 just before Alfa Romeo altered the surrounding territory. Conclude at Chiesa dei Santi Pietro e Paolo, whose predecessor appears in Goffredo da Bussero's late-thirteenth-century Liber Notitiae Sanctorum Mediolani and whose present building arose after population growth made the older church inadequate. Construction began in 1880, the new church was blessed in 1882, its bell tower followed in 1887 and Ugo Zanchetta completed the facade in 1927 before Mario Grandi Chiodo added major interior frescoes in 1931. The progression moves from Alfa Romeo constructing a corporate world around engineering and historical memory through Valera preserving traces of the agrarian settlement that preceded mass industrialization into a parish church repeatedly enlarged as Arese itself grew, revealing the radically different communities that shaped the territory surrounding Il Centro Arese.
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