Why Ex Richard-Ginori matters.
Ex Richard-Ginori is an imposing industrial enclave where San Cristoforo's canal-side character meets Milan's ceramic manufacturing history, preserved factory architecture and the creative district that later occupied one of the Naviglio Grande's largest production sites.
Set along Via Morimondo near Via Lodovico il Moro and just steps from the Naviglio Grande, the former factory occupies an extensive industrial compound where long brick workshops, large windows, internal lanes and planted courtyards interrupt the tighter residential and commercial blocks spreading through San Cristoforo. Surviving factory buildings retain tall ceilings and repetitive structural bays developed for ceramic production across successive periods of expansion. The canal runs immediately north of the complex, preserving the relationship between manufacturing ground, water transport and the industrial corridor that developed along this stretch of the Naviglio. Converted workshops now accommodate offices, studios and showrooms without erasing the scale of the former production halls or the internal circulation created between them. The result is an unusually extensive piece of industrial Milan where nineteenth-century manufacturing, twentieth-century design and later reuse remain physically legible across the same compound.
What defines Ex Richard-Ginori.
Ex Richard-Ginori is best known for preserving the San Cristoforo factory where Giulio Richard transformed a small porcelain operation into the industrial enterprise that eventually joined the Ginori manufacture and became a major force in Italian ceramics. The site originated from a country property established in 1710 before Giuseppe Stefano Orelli opened a glass and crystal works there in 1811. Gindrad converted the premises to porcelain production in 1830, and ownership passed through Count Tinelli before Giulio Richard acquired the factory on May 23, 1842. Richard expanded production beyond porcelain into hard earthenware, majolica and ceramics intended for a far broader market, coupling technical growth with substantial enlargement of the San Cristoforo works. His investment extended into the surrounding settlement through a school and nursery created during the 1840s, followed in 1859 by workers' housing, a cooperative store and schools devoted to music, drawing and modeling. Formation of the Società Ceramica Richard in 1873 marked another expansion: the San Cristoforo works covered 21,000 square meters and operated 12 kilns, 26 continuous-flame muffles and 100 mills driven through water power and steam. Production reached eight million pieces annually by 1881 under the technical direction of Augusto Richard. Expansion in 1895 added 95,590 square meters to the original industrial ground, requiring a Decauville railway to move goods between distant departments. The following year Richard absorbed the Ginori manufacture at Doccia, creating Società Ceramica Richard-Ginori and placing the Milan factory within an enterprise spanning San Cristoforo, Pisa and Doccia.
San Cristoforo entered another period of distinction when ceramic manufacture became a testing ground for some of twentieth-century Italian design's most consequential figures. Gio Ponti became Richard-Ginori's artistic director in 1923 and used the company to connect industrial manufacture with a new decorative repertoire, working with Salvatore Saponaro and inviting artists including Fausto Melotti into ceramic production. Giovanni Gariboldi entered the San Cristoforo works in 1926 at eighteen, became Ponti's close collaborator and continued experimenting with form, glazes and production after Ponti's departure. Gariboldi assumed artistic direction in 1946, and his 1936 stoneware cup produced at San Cristoforo for the VI Triennale survives in the applied-arts collections of Castello Sforzesco. The Milan plant concentrated on hard earthenware after the 1896 merger had shifted porcelain production principally to Doccia, giving its workshops a distinct technical role inside the larger company. Bombing during the Second World War destroyed several departments, followed by reconstruction and modernization during the 1940s and 1950s. Industrial activity ended in 1986, leaving the extensive works abandoned before conservation work in 1996 and 1998 began converting the corner of Via Morimondo and Via Lodovico il Moro into studios and professional premises. A larger redevelopment launched in 2002 extended across more than 60,000 square meters and retained substantial factory volumes as the compound shifted toward fashion, design, advertising, art and media.
How Ex Richard-Ginori fits.
Ex Richard-Ginori works as the anchor for a daytime exploration along the Naviglio Grande and adjoining Barona using three nearby sites that move from a medieval canal-side religious complex through a nineteenth-century sporting institution into agricultural ground whose history reaches a medieval monastery.
Begin at San Cristoforo sul Naviglio, a double church whose older component was rebuilt in 1192 before friar Pietro Franzoni of Tavernasco established an adjoining pilgrim hospital in 1364. Gian Galeazzo Visconti sponsored the fifteenth-century Cappella Ducale after the plague of 1399, dedicating it to San Cristoforo, Giovanni Battista, Giacomo and Cristina and placing the Visconti biscione beside Milan's civic cross on the facade. The foundation also commemorated the Visconti victory over the Armagnacs near Alessandria on July 25, 1391, and Ludovico il Moro came to San Cristoforo in 1491 to meet Beatrice d'Este on her arrival from Ferrara. Continue to Canottieri Milano, founded on October 15, 1890 through Guido Alessandro Bonnet and formally constituted in 1891 as rowing became an organized sport along Milan's waterways. The Comune granted the club its present San Cristoforo ground in 1922 after displacement from the Darsena, whereupon the surviving Liberty clubhouse was built beside the Naviglio. An Olympic diving tower followed in 1926, and by 1929 membership had reached 2,000. The club later replaced its canal-fed pool with an independent Olympic basin inaugurated in 1958, continuing a sporting history that produced Olympic competitors across rowing, swimming and diving. Conclude at Cascina Battivacco, whose ancestry reaches a twelfth-century foundation known as monasterium de Bativachia S. Eusebi cum S. Salvatore. The complex later belonged to the nuns of Santa Maria in Valle and appears in the 1722 Catasto Teresiano within the Corpi Santi di Ticinese before Carlo Pozzi donated it to the Ospedale Maggiore in 1879. Its quadrilateral agricultural court, stables, granary and colonists' houses preserve the organization of a working farm at the edge of rice fields extending south and west from urban Milan. The progression moves from Visconti patronage at a medieval canal crossing through organized sport rooted directly in the Naviglio into a monastic agricultural property that survived metropolitan expansion, revealing three institutions shaped by the waterways and productive territory surrounding San Cristoforo.
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