Why Magazzini Raccordati matters.
Magazzini Raccordati is a formidable industrial complex where Centrale's infrastructural character meets a two-kilometer sequence of vaulted railway chambers, early twentieth-century freight engineering and an elevated rail embankment that became an architectural wall through northern Milan.
Set along Via Ferrante Aporti near Via Giovanni Battista Sammartini and just steps from Piazza Duca d'Aosta, the complex occupies the base of Milano Centrale's immense railway embankment, where repetitive arched portals, exposed brick, iron shutters and deep vaulted interiors extend along parallel streets on opposite sides of the tracks. More than one hundred individual chambers form an almost continuous street frontage beneath the elevated railway, giving infrastructure normally concealed inside a station an unusually direct presence at pavement level. Barrel-vaulted openings repeat beneath the embankment as road tunnels periodically cut through its mass, connecting neighborhoods otherwise separated by the railway corridor. Liberty-derived geometric decoration and ironwork soften the utilitarian facades without diminishing the extraordinary length and weight of the structure. The result is an immense piece of railway architecture whose streets, vaults and elevated tracks expose the freight machinery that once operated beneath Milano Centrale.
What defines Magazzini Raccordati.
Magazzini Raccordati is best known for turning the raised railway approach to Milano Centrale into an integrated freight system where trains, storage chambers and street distribution operated at different levels of the same structure. Construction developed between 1914 and 1921 as Milan reorganized its railway network around the future terminal, with the elevated approach already entering service in 1914 before Ulisse Stacchini's passenger station opened in 1931. More than one hundred chambers eventually extended for over two kilometers along Via Ferrante Aporti and Via Giovanni Battista Sammartini, creating more than 40,000 square meters of enclosed space beneath the railway. Two internal service tracks penetrated the embankment and connected the individual units directly with the rail network, generating the Raccordati name from the physical rail connections serving them. Freight entered at the lower railway level for unloading before goods moved through the chambers and outward to adjoining streets, separating rail operations from the passenger traffic above. Lifts connected the lower system with the station's track level, embedding vertical movement within an infrastructure otherwise organized as a long horizontal sequence. The arrangement also operated in relation to Milan's customs boundary: the railway compound functioned as a free-zone-like territory, with fencing along Aporti and Sammartini and customs posts controlling goods as they entered the city street network. Exposed brick, barrel vaults, geometric cement ornament and wrought-iron portals gave the utilitarian system a late Liberty character with emerging Deco influence. Rail freight declined during the later twentieth century as road transport displaced the distribution model for which the chambers had been built, leaving large portions unused after decades in which the complex had functioned as one of the hidden logistical engines beneath Centrale.
A new architectural chapter has concentrated on the Sammartini side through Dropcity, conceived by architect Andrea Caputo in 2018 as a center devoted to architecture and design. The project assigned more than 10,000 square meters across 28 former railway tunnels to exhibition galleries, production ateliers, carpentry, robotics, advanced prototyping, research and teaching. Dropcity Convention first opened portions of the chambers during Milan Design Week in 2022, followed in 2023 by activity across tunnels 38 through 60 supported by the Ministry of Culture's Festival Architettura program. That edition included the Tunnel Evangelion competition, which drew more than 200 submissions proposing new uses for the repetitive vaulted infrastructure and selected ten finalists through a jury including Federica Sofia Zambeletti, Manuel Orazi and Fosbury Architecture. A 2022 agreement involving the Comune di Milano, Grandi Stazioni Retail and Supermoon established a larger recovery program encompassing 9,149 square meters, with fabrication laboratories, teaching and exhibition areas, coworking and other design-focused functions planned within the historic chambers. Municipal revisions approved in February 2026 reorganized implementation into separate phases while retaining the wider commitment to the Sammartini intervention. The conversion gives the serial railway vault a second architectural mechanism: chambers standardized for freight transfer are being reused as individually programmable spaces for design production, fabrication and exhibition without dissolving the long structural sequence that made the complex distinctive.
How Magazzini Raccordati fits.
Magazzini Raccordati works as the anchor for a daytime exploration through Centrale and the adjoining northern center using three nearby sites that move from a surviving Sforza-period suburban villa through a postwar office tower into the twenty-first-century institutional architecture that changed Milan's northern skyline.
Begin at Cascina Pozzobonelli, a surviving fragment of a suburban residence dating to 1492 and associated with the family of Gian Giacomo Pozzobonelli. The original complex comprised a rectangular palazzo, two large courtyards and extensive reception rooms before construction of Viale Andrea Doria brought demolition in stages between 1898 and 1907. A ten-arched portico and chapel survived, the latter organized around a central square plan with three semicircular apses, an octagonal drum and lantern. Painted decoration once covering the portico attracted Luca Beltrami during his research for the reconstruction of Castello Sforzesco's Torre del Filarete, connecting this fragment beside Centrale with one of Milan's largest historic restoration campaigns. Continue to Torre Galfa, designed by Melchiorre Bega and completed during Milan's postwar building surge as a slender office tower at the intersection of Via Galvani and Via Fara. Its name combined the two street names into a compact designation, and the building became part of the vertical business district that developed around Centrale and Piazza della Repubblica during the economic boom. A rectilinear structural frame and continuous glazed curtain wall replaced the masonry language of the prewar city with the light exterior envelope increasingly associated with corporate Milan. Decades of office use and later vacancy were followed by a twenty-first-century recovery that preserved the tower as the surrounding district entered another construction cycle. Conclude at Palazzo Lombardia, designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners with Caputo Partnership and Sistema Duemila after an international competition promoted in 2003. Construction ran from 2006 to 2010, producing curving lower buildings around covered public spaces and a 161-meter tower rising 39 floors above the complex. The commission consolidated regional offices within a new architectural center between Centrale and Garibaldi, placing an international design team within territory that had undergone successive railway, industrial and commercial transformations since the nineteenth century. The progression moves from a fifteenth-century suburban residence reduced by Milan's railway-age expansion through Bega's postwar corporate tower into Pei Cobb Freed, Caputo Partnership and Sistema Duemila's twenty-first-century institutional complex, developing three successive architectural scales around the territory dominated by Centrale.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Enjoy editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
Foresyte may earn a commission when you book.
