Washington, Milan

Why you should experience Washington in Milan, Italy.

Washington is a cultivated enclave where western Milan's residential elegance meets broad tree-lined avenues, early twentieth-century architecture and a local culture shaped between Piazza Piemonte and the city's former industrial edge.

Positioned between Magenta, De Angeli and Solari, the neighborhood occupies a western sector of Milan organized around Via Giorgio Washington and the spacious axis extending south from Piazza Piemonte. Apartment buildings, planted medians and neighborhood storefronts give the avenue a measured scale that changes gradually as it approaches Piazza Napoli. Piazza Piemonte creates the district's most formal urban room, opening the surrounding residential streets around lawns, mature trees and substantial perimeter buildings. Corso Vercelli extends the area eastward through one of western Milan's established shopping corridors, joining the quieter side streets to a concentrated commercial spine. Washington rewards exploration through these shifts in scale, carrying the polished character of western Milan from broad avenues into architecture-rich residential streets and intimate neighborhood squares.

What you should know about Washington.

Washington is best known for developing along one of the principal western expansion axes created as Milan pushed beyond its nineteenth-century limits, transforming countryside associated with Porta Magenta into a district where residential construction and precision manufacturing grew beside one another. The late nineteenth-century Beruto plan established the broad avenue that became Via Giorgio Washington, connecting Piazza Piemonte with Piazza Napoli as the city expanded westward. Industrial development acquired a major presence when Romualdo Borletti moved his precision-mechanics company from Via San Vittore to Via Giorgio Washington in 1912, fifteen years after founding the business around clock production. The first Borletti works combined a shed-roofed structure along Via Costanza with offices and a continuous industrial frontage facing Via Giorgio Washington. Production had reached 1,000 alarm clocks and 1,800 pocket watches per day by 1914. Engineers R. Brini and S. Roveda subsequently expanded the plant between 1916 and 1920, joining a larger building directly to the earlier works as Romualdo's sons Senatore Borletti and Romualdo Borletti Jr. carried the company into its Fratelli Borletti period. Wartime manufacture introduced artillery fuses beside timepieces, and the 1930s brought production above 5,000 pieces per day with 2,000 specialized workers. Sewing machines joined the company's output during the 1950s, extending the plant across Via Giorgio Washington before industrial decline beginning in the 1970s brought closure and later conversion. Architect Marco Zanuso subsequently worked on the principal five-storey Borletti building, preserving an architectural connection between the district's manufacturing history and its later reinvention.

Piazza Piemonte gave Washington a separate architectural distinction through the pair of high-rise residential buildings erected during the 1920s at the northern entrance to Via Giorgio Washington. Mario Borgato directed the building at No. 2, with E. G. Macchi and Giuseppe Rusconi Clerici responsible for its counterpart at No. 1. Their height required a special departure from Milan's existing 28-meter building limit, placing the project directly inside the city's early debate over vertical residential construction. The completed buildings rose to 38 meters, their projecting volumes, upper setbacks and domed crowns producing two related compositions flanking the mouth of Via Giorgio Washington. Politecnico di Milano scholarship places the project among Milan's early experiments with tall residential architecture and connects its unusual massing with contemporary arguments over density, light and the possibilities created by taller buildings. The pair preceded Milan's better-known interwar towers, giving Washington a consequential place in the architectural experimentation that reshaped the city skyline during the decades between the Beruto expansion and mature Italian modernism.

How to fold Washington into your trip.

Washington works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing Milanese music, Liberty architecture and popular theater through the streets surrounding Piazza Piemonte.

Begin at Casa Verdi, where Giuseppe Verdi turned concern for aging musicians into an institution conceived during the final years of his life, commissioning architect Camillo Boito to design the Casa Verdi on land the composer had acquired beyond the established city. Construction began in 1896 and finished in 1900, with Verdi assigning the institution property and future income from his operatic copyrights through his testament; the first residents entered in 1902, after his death. Boito developed the complex through a medievalizing Lombard architectural language of exposed brick and pale stone, with the internal courtyard leading toward the chapel and the crypt containing Verdi and his wife Giuseppina Strepponi. Ludovico Pogliaghi supplied designs for the crypt mosaics, adding another major Milanese artist to a project Verdi called his “opera mia più bella.” Continue to Villa Romeo Faccanoni, where Giuseppe Sommaruga developed another strand of early twentieth-century Milanese design for engineer Luigi Faccanoni between 1912 and 1914. Sommaruga brought cabinetmaker Eugenio Quarti and ironwork specialist Alessandro Mazzucotelli into the commission, joining architecture, decorative arts and metalwork within a villa from the mature season of Milanese Liberty. Conclude at Teatro Nazionale, commissioned by cinema entrepreneur Mauro Rota and designed by Mario Borgato near Piazza Piemonte before opening on December 20, 1924 with Sem Benelli's La cena delle beffe. Reinforced concrete placed the building within the technical experimentation of its era, and later decades carried the room between cinema, theater and other forms of entertainment. Giordano Rota modernized the theater during the 1980s, when impresario Roberto Rindi helped restore stage performance and the venue hosted Rudolf Nureyev during his return to Italy. The progression moves from Verdi and Boito's institution for musicians through Sommaruga, Quarti and Mazzucotelli's integrated decorative arts into Borgato's twentieth-century performance house, revealing how music, architecture and theater developed around Washington as western Milan expanded beyond its nineteenth-century edge.

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