Why you should experience Camping Milano in Milan, Italy.
Camping Milano is an open-air village where San Siro's western green belt, sporting culture, peripheral reinvention and unusual coexistence of city and countryside converge within Milan's only campground.
Set along Via Gaetano Airaghi near Via Novara and just steps from Acquatica Park, the campground occupies the threshold where Milan's continuous urban fabric gives way to a broad western landscape of wooded parks, former agricultural land and open spaces extending toward the municipal boundary. Tree-lined pitches and detached accommodation distribute the stay across five hectares, creating a physical experience governed by outdoor space in a city better known for dense apartment blocks and enclosed courtyards. That low-density arrangement changes the rhythm of staying in Milan, placing caravans, tents and small independent buildings beneath mature vegetation on the same western edge that leads toward San Siro and the city's major park system. The result is a campground whose defining character comes from experiencing Milan at the precise point where metropolitan density begins dissolving into the greener territory beyond it.
What you should know about Camping Milano.
Camping Milano is best known for originating with the 1990 FIFA World Cup, when Milan created the Via Airaghi campground to accommodate the influx surrounding a tournament that brought matches including the opening game, a semifinal and the final stages to San Siro. The property survived the event that produced it and developed into the only campground operating inside Milan's municipal boundaries. Denise Ottobrini and Gil Elbaz took over management in 1998, beginning a family stewardship that subsequently carried the site through another major international event seventeen years later. Expo Milano 2015 prompted Ottobrini and Elbaz to undertake a complete renewal, giving a campground born from one global event a second major reinvention for another. That investment arrived as millions of people were preparing to enter Milan for the six-month Expo, shifting the property from its World Cup origins into a broader form of year-round urban accommodation. The following years tested that model severely as the pandemic interrupted international travel, but business had rebounded decisively by summer 2023. Occupancy exceeded 90 percent, July and the central weeks of August sold out, and Alessandro Elbaz credited both returning international demand and Milan's major concert season with the recovery. Approximately 90 percent of the clientele came from outside Italy, led by travelers from the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and France, with arrivals extending as far as the United States, South Korea and China. A campground created for Italia 90 had evolved across three decades into a surprisingly international gateway shaped by the World Cup, a family takeover, Expo and Milan's emergence as a major concert destination.
Gil Elbaz's stewardship also produced a business whose financial scale reveals how much activity is compressed into an unconventional form of Milanese hospitality. G & D Camping S.r.l., headquartered at the Via Airaghi property with Elbaz as chairman and managing director, generated €1.41 million in revenue during 2022. EBITDA reached €120,600 and net profit exceeded €29,000, with total assets approaching €1.19 million and net equity near €360,000. Those figures came from an enterprise employing seven people at the time, giving the property a distinctive economic profile compared with the staffing structures associated with conventional large urban hotels. Its physical scale is equally unusual: the grounds extend across 50,000 square meters, combining long-stay outdoor capacity with a relatively small built footprint. Current configuration centers on 130 pitches alongside a limited collection of independent accommodation, preserving the open-air model that distinguished the site when it entered Milan's hospitality market. The Elbaz family has progressively widened that model without turning the property into a conventional hotel, adding newer forms of detached accommodation to the established caravan and tent culture. Gil's role now extends into a second generation through Alessandro, whose public discussion of the 2023 recovery shows the family operation continuing more than a quarter-century after the 1998 takeover. The combination of a seven-person operating company, €1.41 million annual revenue, five-hectare footprint and multigenerational management gives Camping Milano a business history as unconventional as its physical presence inside one of Italy's largest cities.
How to fold Camping Milano into your trip.
Camping Milano works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing Milan's western edge through Italy's pioneering urban forest, abandoned extraction pits reclaimed as public landscape and the football stadium built by a tire-industry heir with an obsession for the English game.
Begin at Boscoincittà, created in 1974 after Milan granted Italia Nostra 35 hectares of semi-abandoned agricultural land containing the ruined Cascina San Romano. Thousands of schoolchildren, scouts, families and volunteers joined the early planting campaigns, creating Italy's first experiment in urban forestation during the same period when the 1973 oil shock was forcing Italians to reconsider the relationship between cities, cars and open land. Ugo Ratti, Marco Bacigalupo and Giulio Crespi participated in a project that eventually expanded beyond 110 hectares, with the restored Cascina San Romano becoming its operational center. Continue to Parco delle Cave, whose lakes began as Cabassi, Casati, Ongari, Cerruti and Aurora, extraction pits opened during the 1920s for Milan's demand for gravel and sand. Quarrying ended during the 1960s and portions of the abandoned territory deteriorated into illegal dumping grounds before civic pressure and the 1976 city plan initiated a long recovery; Milan later entrusted the site to Italia Nostra in 1997 after its work at Boscoincittà. Conclude at San Siro Stadium, commissioned in 1925 by AC Milan president Piero Pirelli as a football ground inspired by English stadiums. Alberto Cugini and Ulisse Stacchini designed four independent reinforced-concrete stands for 35,000 spectators, completing construction in thirteen months before Inter defeated Milan 6-3 at the inaugural derby on September 19, 1926. The progression moves from volunteers planting Italy's first urban forest through abandoned gravel pits becoming a 135-hectare park to Pirelli, Cugini and Stacchini building one of European football's great stages, revealing how Milan's western fringe repeatedly turned peripheral land into places of national consequence.
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