Why Cascina Cuccagna matters.
Cascina Cuccagna is a pastoral historic farmstead where Porta Romana's residential character meets seventeenth-century agricultural Milan, enclosed working courtyards and a surviving fragment of countryside absorbed by the modern city.
Set along Via Cuccagna near Via Muratori and just steps from Via Friuli, the farmstead occupies a sheltered enclave where tiled roofs, brick walls, planted courtyards and gardens interrupt the continuous apartment blocks spreading between Porta Romana and Calvairate. Its low wings gather around open ground concealed behind surrounding residential streets, creating a striking change in scale from the multi-story buildings immediately outside. Timber galleries, exterior stairs, deep rooflines and irregular masonry preserve the physical character of a working rural complex assembled through several periods of construction. Gardens extend the enclosure beyond the historic buildings, reinforcing the separation between the farmstead and the dense neighborhood that eventually surrounded it. The result is a rare surviving agricultural compound whose courts and low-built architecture make the former rural edge of Milan physically comprehensible inside the contemporary city.
What defines Cascina Cuccagna.
Cascina Cuccagna is best known for surviving from the agricultural territory of seventeenth-century Milan, when the farmstead belonged to the Fatebenefratelli and supported their medical work through cultivation connected with the Ospedale Maggiore. The complex dates to 1694 or 1695 and appears in the 1722 Catasto Teresiano as Cassina Torchio detta Preganella, fixing its presence within the cultivated land beyond the historic center. The Fatebenefratelli used its surrounding fields to grow medicinal herbs destined for hospital use, linking agricultural production directly with Milanese healthcare. An initial L-shaped building expanded as farming and residential requirements changed, eventually acquiring the E-shaped configuration visible on the 1838 map of Milan's suburbs. A water-powered press supplied the Torchio name, and the roggia driving that equipment survives underground after later urban development covered the watercourse. Residential and productive spaces occupied the same compound, allowing farming, processing and habitation to operate around interconnected courts. During the 1920s, expansion of Milan's new ring road led to demolition of a neighboring farmstead named Cuccagna. Cassina Torchio inherited that name, preserving through toponymy a nearby agricultural property that disappeared as the city advanced across its fields. Artisans subsequently occupied portions of the surviving buildings, and a well-known osteria introduced another use into a complex increasingly enclosed by urban construction. Cascina Cuccagna emerged from that sequence as a physical survivor of the productive landscape erased across much of Porta Romana during Milan's expansion.
The farmstead's modern recovery developed after municipal ownership confronted decades of physical decline. The Comune acquired the property in 1984, and deteriorating conditions led to its evacuation and closure in 1994. Neighborhood residents had already begun organizing around its future during the early 1990s, eventually forming Cooperativa Cuccagna and pursuing reuse of the abandoned complex. Associazione Consorzio Cantiere Cuccagna was established in 2005 after the Comune assigned the property for a twenty-year period, providing an organizational basis for rehabilitation. Marco Dezzi Bardeschi directed the architectural work under a conservation approach that retained surviving historical fabric and made contemporary additions visibly distinct. Construction began in December 2008 and concluded in April 2012, reopening a property that had remained inaccessible for eighteen years. The recovered complex contains close to 3,000 square meters of covered buildings and another 1,500 square meters of gardens and courtyards, preserving the spatial relationship between built wings and open working ground. A further intervention in 2022 established PRE.CU.R.S.OR. as a training site focused on maintenance of historic buildings and seismic-risk prevention. The recovery transformed a farmstead threatened by abandonment into a publicly accessible complex without eliminating the courts, masonry and agricultural morphology that explain its seventeenth-century origin.
How Cascina Cuccagna fits.
Cascina Cuccagna works as the anchor for a daytime exploration through Porta Romana and the adjoining eastern center using three nearby sites that move from an eighteenth-century hospital cemetery through a twentieth-century theater founded by a closely connected artistic group into the surviving pavilion of Milan's former produce market.
Begin at Rotonda della Besana, created after the Ospedale Maggiore purchased land from the Stella family in 1694 to replace its older burial ground beside the Naviglio. Arrisio Arrigoni directed construction of a covered cemetery beginning in 1695, and the first burials took place in July 1697. Plans to enlarge its oratory developed in 1700 before construction of San Michele Arcangelo ai Nuovi Sepolcri began in 1719. Water infiltration and inadequate burial capacity drove another expansion during the same year, producing the great surrounding portico; silk merchant Giambattista Annone supplied financial support that helped bring the enclosure to completion in 1731. Continue to Teatro Franco Parenti, founded in 1972 as Salone Pier Lombardo by Franco Parenti and Andrée Ruth Shammah with Giovanni Testori, Dante Isella and Gian Maurizio Fercioni. The founders selected the cooperative form during a period of crisis for Italy's established theater institutions and developed a program spanning new Italian writing, international drama, reinterpretations of classics, concerts, cinema and public events. Testori's L'Ambleto inaugurated theatrical performances on January 16, 1973 under Shammah's direction with Parenti in the title role and Fercioni responsible for sets and costumes; Macbetto and Edipus subsequently extended their collaboration into the celebrated Testori trilogy. Parenti's death in 1989 brought the theater its present name and placed full direction under Shammah. Conclude at Palazzina Liberty Dario Fo e Franca Rame, the surviving pavilion of the former Verziere produce-market complex along Corso XXII Marzo. Its early twentieth-century architecture belonged to a purpose-built commercial district created as Milan reorganized wholesale food distribution beyond the historic center. After market activity ended, Dario Fo and Franca Rame brought their Collettivo Teatrale La Comune into the abandoned pavilion during the 1970s, converting commercial architecture into an independent performance site. Milan later attached both artists' names to the building, preserving its connection with the theatrical culture that occupied it after the surrounding market disappeared. The progression moves from Arrigoni's cemetery for the Ospedale Maggiore through Parenti, Shammah and Testori's cooperative theater into Fo and Rame's occupation of a former market pavilion, developing three institutions that repeatedly assigned new purposes to architecture around Porta Romana.
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