Why you should experience Cascina Merlata in Milan, Italy.
Cascina Merlata is a contemporary enclave where Milan's northwestern metropolitan edge meets high-rise housing, expansive parkland and the remnants of an agricultural territory once surrounded by the vanished Bosco della Merlata.
Positioned between Gallaratese, Musocco, and Pero, the neighborhood occupies a northwestern pocket where Via Gallarate, Via Daimler and the A4 corridor frame a residential district extending toward the former Expo 2015 grounds. Slender towers, broad pedestrian spaces and long residential blocks rise around an immense central green corridor, creating one of the sharpest concentrations of recent construction on Milan's outer edge. The central park establishes the primary encounter through an extended north-south landscape that places housing behind planted ground and separates pedestrian movement from the principal surrounding roads. Elevated residential volumes deepen the atmosphere by opening long sightlines toward MIND and the western metropolitan horizon across territory whose previous development remained fragmented by infrastructure. The result is a neighborhood where Milan has constructed an entirely new urban district over a former agricultural margin, preparing a history that reaches back through woodland, farm cultivation and the industrial exploitation of the northwestern plain.
What you should know about Cascina Merlata.
Cascina Merlata is best known for occupying territory once dominated by the Bosco della Merlata, an extensive woodland whose name derived from the Merlata watercourse formed by the Nirone and Guisa streams. Giovanni Battista Clarici represented the forest in his seventeenth-century cartography of Milan's surroundings, placing a substantial wooded territory along the northwestern approaches to the city. The forest acquired an enduring association with brigandage along routes crossing the countryside, and the Legorino and Scorlino band became among the best-known criminal groups connected with the area before their execution in May 1566. Progressive clearance accelerated as Milan's demand for timber increased, reducing the woodland across subsequent centuries. Nineteenth-century transportation infrastructure fractured what remained when the railway toward Turin crossed the territory. The 1888 Istituto Geografico Militare map shows the forest largely gone and Cascina Merlata appearing beside the Sempione route in the form and under the name recognizable in the modern period. The exposed ground possessed a clay-rich upper layer comparable with the nearby Groane, encouraging brick production across the former woodland. Fornace dell'Acqua and Fornace Keller operated near the cascina, joined by another kiln farther north, converting the geological conditions beneath the agricultural landscape into an industrial resource. Construction of Milan's new Cimitero Maggiore between 1886 and 1895 consumed another large portion of former wooded territory east of the cascina. Cascina Merlata consequently entered the twentieth century amid a landscape already remade through deforestation, rail construction, brickmaking and the expansion of metropolitan Milan toward Musocco.
The surviving farm complex preserves a separate agricultural history within that altered territory. Cascina Merlata emerged during the opening decades of the seventeenth century and developed as a U-shaped compound whose central porticoed range contained farmers' dwellings with external galleries. Lateral wings accommodated barns and stables, with a wall completing the open side of the court and concentrating agricultural activity inside a clearly bounded ensemble. Cultivation extended across surrounding land long before continuous urban construction reached this northwestern edge of Milan. Historical mapping places the complex near routes linking the city with settlements farther north, and its principal axis crossed the building before continuing through the countryside. Abandonment during the later twentieth century left the farm buildings isolated amid infrastructure and undeveloped land as proposals for the surrounding territory accumulated. Restoration eventually recovered the complex during the extensive redevelopment associated with the district's twenty-first-century transformation. The historic axis through the cascina subsequently became a reference for the long green corridor extending north through the new neighborhood, preserving a spatial relationship inherited from the agricultural settlement inside an otherwise recent district. The seventeenth-century farm consequently supplies Cascina Merlata with a surviving physical anchor from the landscape that preceded its towers, boulevards and metropolitan-scale redevelopment.
How to fold Cascina Merlata into your trip.
Cascina Merlata works as the anchor for an architectural sequence through a landscape project, an Expo-era residential experiment and a vast commercial complex that together reveal the extraordinary speed with which this former peripheral territory acquired a new metropolitan scale.
Begin at Parco Cascina Merlata, designed by Giovanna Longhi and Franco Giorgetta and realized from 2014 as the green spine of the emerging district. The park extends across 190,000 square meters with future expansion toward 270,000, and its central esplanade runs for nearly a kilometer between residential fronts; three squares, a water channel and transverse pedestrian routes structure a landscape whose principal sightline revives the old route passing through the historic farm toward settlements farther north. Continue to Expo Village Social Housing, where seven residential buildings were prepared to accommodate international delegations during Expo Milano 2015 before conversion to permanent housing. Cino Zucchi Architetti, C+S Associati, Mario Cucinella Architects, Teknoarch, B22 and P-U-R-A participated in the architectural program, with Mario Cucinella's contribution comprising three faceted towers arranged around a central open space and B22 and P-U-R-A emerging from the AAA Architetticercasi competition for architects under 35. The wider initiative delivered nearly 700 dwellings across 52,500 square meters of social housing, giving temporary Expo accommodation a planned second life within the residential district. Conclude at Merlata Bloom Milano, the CallisonRTKL complex opened on November 15, 2023 at the northern end of the district. Its architecture extends through two connected buildings beneath extensive glazed roofing, incorporating an 8,500-square-meter glass dome and thousands of cubic meters of engineered timber, with a pedestrian connection continuing toward the former Expo grounds and MIND. The progression moves from Longhi and Giorgetta organizing an entire district around landscape through six architectural practices converting Expo accommodation into permanent housing and culminates in CallisonRTKL extending the neighborhood toward MIND, tracing Cascina Merlata's construction as a new piece of metropolitan Milan.
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