Why Milano Scalo Romana matters.
Milano Scalo Romana is a consequential urban district where Porta Romana's industrial character meets a former freight yard, the infrastructure of Milan's railway expansion and a new piece of city being built around the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Set along Via Giovanni Lorenzini near Via Giuseppe Ripamonti and just steps from Via Brembo, the district occupies an immense former railway corridor where active tracks, cleared industrial ground, surviving rail structures and large construction sites separate the dense residential blocks north of the railway from the former manufacturing territory extending toward Fondazione Prada. The east-west rail line forms the site's strongest physical boundary as bridges and underpasses connect neighborhoods developed independently on either side. Former warehouses and industrial compounds remain visible around the perimeter, preserving the scale of a southern production belt whose factories once depended directly on rail access. New buildings now rise beside temporary landscapes and retained railway infrastructure as the former yard shifts from an enclosed transport zone toward a district threaded with pedestrian connections and public ground. The result is a vast transitional landscape where Milan's industrial railway geography remains visible inside one of the city's largest contemporary reconstruction projects.
What defines Milano Scalo Romana.
Milano Scalo Romana is best known for transforming a former railway freight yard through a redevelopment process accelerated by Milan and Cortina's successful bid for the 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games. The yard belonged to the southern railway infrastructure developed as Milan's industrial economy expanded beyond Porta Romana, occupying a strategic position between the historic city and manufacturing districts extending toward the southern periphery. Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, Comune di Milano and Regione Lombardia incorporated Scalo Romana into the 2017 program agreement governing redevelopment of seven disused Milanese railway yards. That agreement opened more than one million square meters of former railway territory across the city to new construction and public green space, with Scalo Romana assigned a major role in the southern transformation. FS Sistemi Urbani launched an international competition for the site after the Olympic Village was assigned to the yard, drawing 47 multidisciplinary teams and 329 participating studios and professionals from 14 countries. The jury announced Parco Romana as the winning masterplan on March 31, 2021. OUTCOMIST, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, PLP Architecture, Carlo Ratti Associati and Arup led the winning group, connecting urban planning, architecture, landscape and infrastructure within a proposal organized around a large central green corridor. The masterplan divided development among Covivio, Prada Holding and Coima, the three owners that had acquired the site from FS Sistemi Urbani. Olympic deadlines placed the village at the front of the construction sequence, turning a long-term railway-yard redevelopment into a project with a fixed international event driving its first completed district. Milano Scalo Romana occupies a pivotal point between the nineteenth and twentieth-century infrastructure that industrialized southern Milan and the redevelopment program reshaping former railway land across the twenty-first-century city.
The Olympic Village established the first major architectural component of the new district through a project led by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Coima launched the competition in 2021 and selected SOM's scheme, developed with Cino Zucchi Architetti, Barreca & La Varra, Stantec, Studio Laura Gatti and Portland Design. Six new residential buildings joined two converted historic structures around shared open ground, creating accommodation for athletes during Milano Cortina 2026. Construction began in 2023, and the village was delivered to Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026 in July 2025. The project was conceived from the outset for conversion after the Games, with the athletes' residences assigned a subsequent role as student housing. Three historic structures within the former railway territory were incorporated into the complex, preserving physical fragments of the yard as new construction advanced around them. Renewable-energy systems, reuse of existing buildings and the post-Games conversion strategy tied the Olympic deadline to a longer residential program for the district. Completion of the village before the wider masterplan established Scalo Romana's first permanent neighborhood and made adaptive reuse central to the initial phase of redevelopment.
How Milano Scalo Romana fits.
Milano Scalo Romana works as the anchor for a daytime exploration through southern Milan using three nearby sites that move from a converted distillery through an eighteenth-century farmstead into a surviving industrial complex associated with the city's former food-production infrastructure.
Begin at Fondazione Prada, where OMA converted an early twentieth-century distillery into a cultural complex that opened in 2015. Rem Koolhaas and the OMA team retained warehouses, laboratories and industrial structures beside new interventions including the Podium and Cinema, treating the accumulated factory compound as the basis for the architectural project. Torre, completed in 2018, added a nine-story vertical component whose irregular floor heights and changing geometries extended the complex beyond the original industrial enclosure. Permanent installations by Robert Gober, Louise Bourgeois and Thomas Demand joined temporary exhibitions within a 23,700-square-meter campus that established a major cultural institution inside the former production territory south of the railway. Continue to Cascina Cuccagna, built in 1694 and appearing in the 1722 Catasto Teresiano as Cassina Torchio detta Preganella. The Fatebenefratelli owned the property, and surrounding fields supplied medicinal plants for their hospital as a water-powered press contributed the Torchio designation. Expansion transformed the original L-shaped farm into an E-shaped complex visible in an 1838 map of Milan's outskirts. Municipal acquisition followed in 1984, and a citizen-led recovery eventually produced the restoration completed between 2008 and 2012, preserving a substantial agricultural complex inside the modern city. Conclude at Ex Macello di Porta Vittoria, developed as Milan reorganized slaughtering and wholesale food functions into a vast purpose-built compound east of Porta Romana. The complex grew into a system of pavilions, covered circulation routes and specialized processing structures tied to the nearby railway and Ortomercato territory, concentrating industrial food distribution within a district previously occupied by peripheral fields. Twentieth-century expansion reinforced its scale before declining operations left extensive historic structures available for redevelopment. Its surviving architecture preserves another major component of the production belt that once surrounded the southern and eastern railway approaches. The progression moves from OMA's conversion of a distillery through the recovery of a seventeenth-century agricultural complex into the industrial architecture of Milan's former slaughterhouse district, developing three successive forms of production that shaped the territory surrounding Scalo Romana.
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