Why you should experience Via Durini in Milan, Italy.
Via Durini is a refined corridor where San Babila's design culture meets seventeenth-century patrician architecture, preserved courtyard houses and a concentration of Italian furniture showrooms that has made the street a focal point of Milan Design Week.
Running through San Babila between Piazza San Babila and Largo Augusto, the gently curving corridor occupies the historic connection between the eastern city center and the former Porta Tosa district. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century façades stand beside twentieth-century palazzi and expansive glazed storefronts, creating a street wall whose changing scale exposes several phases of Central Milanese development within a few blocks. Furniture and interior-design showrooms establish its primary rhythm through large windows and carefully composed displays, with B&B Italia, Cassina and other major Italian companies concentrating around the street. Historic portals, internal courts and ornamental ironwork introduce another register, preserving residential architecture behind commercial frontages increasingly associated with contemporary design. The result is a corridor where Milanese domestic architecture and the city's international furniture industry occupy the same compact streetscape, giving Via Durini a cultural reach far beyond its short length.
What you should know about Via Durini.
Via Durini is best known for acquiring its present character through Palazzo Durini, the seventeenth-century residence whose construction changed a modest lane called Cantarana di Porta Tosa into an aristocratic address. The earlier name derived from the watercourse running beside the street, where humble houses, gardens and the churches of San Giovanni in Era and Santa Maria della Sanità occupied territory beside the ancient line of Maximian's Roman walls. Giovanni Battista Durini and his brothers began assembling the palace site in 1644, purchasing a Mandelli house on July 21 before acquiring adjoining property from Margherita Niguarda and her children in February 1645. A municipal agreement ceded additional ground for rectification of the street as the existing houses were demolished, directly linking construction of the residence with alteration of the corridor itself. Giovanni Battista commissioned Francesco Maria Richini, whose design organized the residence around a porticoed court with paired Doric columns, a ceremonial staircase, service court and rear garden. Durini purchased the title attached to the County of Monza from the final descendants of the de Leyva family in 1648 and received investiture from Philip IV of Spain three years later, making the new residence part of his ascent from merchant wealth into the Milanese aristocracy. Painted rooms subsequently brought artists including Melchiorre Gherardini, the Nuvolone family, Ercole Procaccini and Stefano Maria Legnani into the residence, and the Durini collection grew to encompass an important picture gallery and a major group of tapestries. The property passed through Senator Borletti before Gianni Caproni acquired it in 1925, following restoration associated with Piero Portaluppi. Via Durini consequently carries the name of the family whose residence altered both the social standing and physical form of a former waterside lane.
A separate cultural history developed at number 20, where Arturo Toscanini lived and worked from 1909 until 1957, apart from periods spent outside Italy. A plaque on the building fixes those dates and commemorates his life there in the name of music and liberty, connecting the address with both his conducting career and his opposition to Fascism. The residence itself predates Toscanini: the seventeenth-century house contains a Rococo courtyard and an elaborate wrought-iron balcony constructed in the Andalusian tradition, a rare decorative feature in Milan. Photographs preserved in the Archivio di Stato di Milano place Toscanini's family and household inside Via Durini 20 as early as 1913, providing a domestic counterpart to the public career he pursued at La Scala and abroad. The address acquired another place in operatic history in September 1951, when Wally Toscanini summoned Maria Callas to Via Durini before her father's departure from Milan and Callas met the conductor there on September 27. Arturo Ferrari had already fixed the building within Milanese visual culture in a 1919 drawing showing Casa Toscanini beside the nearby church of the Crociferi. These episodes turned a private Baroque-era residence into one of the corridor's strongest connections with twentieth-century musical history, carrying Via Durini from domestic architecture into the world surrounding Toscanini and La Scala.
How to fold Via Durini into your trip.
Via Durini works as the anchor to an exploration of eastern Central Milan through a 1930s villa commissioned by an industrial family, a nineteenth-century house museum assembled around Renaissance art and a noble residence whose collections entered the civic patrimony after the Second World War.
Begin at Villa Necchi Campiglio, designed by Piero Portaluppi between 1932 and 1935 for Angelo Campiglio, his wife Gigina Necchi and her sister Nedda, members of a prosperous industrial family. Portaluppi placed the freestanding residence within the former Sola-Busca garden territory on Via Mozart, using the commission to develop one of his principal domestic works before Tomaso Buzzi later reworked portions of its interiors; the villa subsequently joined Milan's circuit of historic house museums. Continue to Museo Bagatti Valsecchi, where brothers Fausto and Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi began reshaping their family residence during the 1880s around an ambitious reconstruction of Lombard Renaissance domestic culture. Their fifteenth and sixteenth-century collection incorporated paintings by Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, Giampietrino and Bernardo Zenale alongside furniture, maiolica, glass and parade armor, with the original arrangement preserved after Pasino Bagatti Valsecchi established the family foundation in 1974 and the museum opened in 1994. Conclude at Palazzo Morando, a late sixteenth-century residence extensively shaped during the eighteenth century before becoming the home of Lydia Caprara di Montalba and Gian Giacomo Morando Attendolo Bolognini in the early twentieth century. Lydia left the palace, its furnishings and artworks to Milan in 1945 with the intention that it become a museum, and the building later received the city's Costume and Fashion collection, spanning clothing and accessories from the seventeenth century into the early 2000s. The progression moves from Portaluppi's architecture for an industrial family through the Bagatti Valsecchi brothers' reconstruction of Renaissance domestic culture and onward to Lydia Morando's conversion of a noble residence into civic patrimony, tracing three different ways Milanese private houses entered the city's cultural life.
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