Why you should experience Giardino Oreste del Buono in Milan, Italy.
Giardino Oreste del Buono is an inventive postindustrial garden where Porta Vittoria's manufacturing past, Milanese symbolism, recreational culture and literary heritage converge across the former Motta and ATM grounds.
Set along Viale Campania near Via Terenzio and just steps from the former ATM building at Viale Campania 12, the garden occupies part of a 3.2-hectare industrial tract where a municipal tram depot operated before Motta-Alivar converted the property into confectionery production, leaving a succession of transport and manufacturing histories beneath the later residential district. Two sections divided by Via Terenzio are joined visually by a raised serpent 300 meters long and up to three meters high, with a six-meter mosaic-covered head at one end and a climbable stone head at the other. Tree-lined paths, open lawns and the enormous biscione turn the former factory terrain into a sequence of greenery, sculpture and recreation whose centerpiece deliberately borrows Milan's ancient heraldic emblem. The result is a public garden where the physical disappearance of a twentieth-century industrial complex gave western Porta Vittoria a new landscape without completely erasing the transportation and confectionery histories that preceded it.
What you should know about Giardino Oreste del Buono.
Giardino Oreste del Buono is best known for transforming former Motta and ATM industrial ground into a 12,500-square-meter garden designed by Gilberto Oneto and Studio Conti Associati between 2005 and 2010. The redevelopment belonged to a larger intervention across the block bounded by Viale Campania, Viale Corsica, Via Zanella and Via Terenzio, where the old industrial property was converted after Motta-Alivar ceased using the site near the end of the 1980s. Oneto and his collaborators divided the garden into two sections on opposite sides of Via Terenzio, then gave those separated spaces a single visual axis through the enormous biscione. The raised serpent travels 300 meters through the garden and reaches three meters in height, converting Milan's heraldic snake into topography rather than placing a conventional freestanding sculpture at the center of the grounds. Two dramatically different heads terminate the composition: one rises six meters beneath colored mosaic, and the other becomes a stone-covered climbing structure. A surviving building from the industrial complex remained at the Viale Campania edge, creating a rare physical counterpoint between the new garden and the site's earlier twentieth-century architecture. The 2005 to 2010 conversion, 300-meter biscione and retained industrial building made the former factory tract legible through three successive forms, first infrastructure, then manufacturing ground and finally a public landscape organized around an unmistakably Milanese symbol.
The name introduced an entirely different connection to Milan when the city dedicated the former Parco ex Motta to Oreste Del Buono in 2015, placing one of Italy's most eclectic twentieth-century editors beside a building subsequently associated with the city's comic culture. Del Buono moved to Milan in 1935, entered the wartime Italian navy in 1943 and spent the period following the armistice as a German prisoner in an Austrian camp before publishing Racconto d'inverno in 1945 from that experience. His editorial career moved through Feltrinelli, Bompiani, Rizzoli, Mondadori and Einaudi, spanning fiction, translation, cinema, crime writing and popular culture. Linus became a crucial part of that career after his involvement with the magazine from its first issue in 1965 and his decade as director beginning in the early 1970s, helping elevate comics within Italian intellectual culture. He subsequently directed Mondadori's Gialli and wrote extensively about Milan, including the Corriere della Sera column La talpa di città. The April 2015 dedication joined that publishing legacy to a former industrial tract already being repurposed around comics, giving the garden's name an unusually precise relationship with the cultural afterlife of the property.
How to fold Giardino Oreste del Buono into your trip.
Giardino Oreste del Buono works as the anchor for a daytime progression through Milan's industrial food history, the surviving architectural center of its former wholesale produce trade and an eighteenth-century burial complex created by the Ospedale Maggiore.
Begin at the former ATM building at Viale Campania 12, constructed in 1926 as part of the Deposito Tranviario Vittoria, with reinforced-concrete tram sheds extending across ground now absorbed into the garden. The surviving street building contained offices, a gatehouse and staff dining spaces, acquired its present appearance during alterations in 1938 and passed to Motta in 1960 when the confectionery company expanded its neighboring Viale Corsica operation. Motta abandoned the industrial complex in 1985, and the surviving building later became WOW Spazio Fumetto in 2011, hosting more than 200 exhibitions before that institution departed in 2025. Continue to Palazzina Liberty Dario Fo e Franca Rame, designed by Alberto Migliorini between 1908 and 1911 as the café, restaurant and negotiating pavilion of Milan's wholesale fruit-and-vegetable market. Merchants used the building as the Borsino del Mercato amid an immense complex of iron-and-glass halls that operated at Porta Vittoria until the wholesale trade moved to Via Lombroso in 1965. The pavilion alone survived, and in 1974 Dario Fo and Franca Rame's La Comune converted it into a center for theater and political culture. Conclude at Rotonda della Besana, begun in 1695 after the Ospedale Maggiore's existing burial ground became inadequate. San Michele ai Nuovi Sepolcri rose within the complex during the eighteenth century, and the surrounding portico expanded burial capacity until closure in 1782 after 150,000 people had been interred there. Eugène de Beauharnais proposed converting the complex into a national pantheon in 1808, but Napoleon's fall ended the project before the former cemetery eventually passed to Milan in 1939. The progression moves from a tram depot becoming Motta industrial property and later a center for comics through Milan's wholesale food trade becoming a theatrical stage into an Ospedale Maggiore cemetery acquiring a new civic life, exposing three extraordinary reinventions of obsolete urban infrastructure around Giardino Oreste del Buono.
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