Why you should experience Parco Don Luigi Giussani in Milan, Italy.
Parco Don Luigi Giussani is a restorative urban garden where Solari's railway past, thirties landscape design, modern architecture and sculptural art converge across ground once devoted to moving livestock through industrial Milan.
Set along Viale Coni Zugna near Via Solari and just steps from Piazza Sant'Agostino, the park occupies the former railway livestock yard that connected Porta Genova with the Sempione freight system, carrying animals toward a municipal slaughterhouse established nearby in 1862 before the disappearance of the yard released this infrastructure for public green space. Mature trees now frame winding paths, Enrico Casiraghi's rock fountain and broad lawns across 43,100 square meters, replacing the movement of freight with an unusually secluded landscape close to the Navigli. Arrigo Arrighetti's curving Piscina Solari and Kan Yasuda's polished stone Porta del Ritorno introduce two radically different artistic interventions among the planting, allowing architecture and sculpture to punctuate the garden. The result is an urban garden where the disappearance of a railway yard produced a sequence of landscape, architecture and art that has continued evolving for nearly a century.
What you should know about Parco Don Luigi Giussani.
Parco Don Luigi Giussani is best known for Enrico Casiraghi's 1935 conversion of a disused railway yard into one of Milan's early twentieth-century neighborhood parks. Casiraghi was simultaneously developing Parco Lambro, giving him two radically different opportunities to introduce large public landscapes into an expanding city during the same period. His Solari scheme organized tree groups, resting areas and a circular fountain around rocks of ceppo gentile, creating a deliberately composed garden on terrain previously dominated by rail infrastructure. Water supplied another striking element: an open branch of the Olona initially crossed the park on its route toward the Darsena, and the section between Via Valparaiso and Viale Coni Zugna became the first portion of the river covered in Milan in 1935. The river's remaining Darsena branch was progressively removed from view as Milan redirected the increasingly polluted water away from the Navigli. Casiraghi's railway conversion consequently became entangled with another fundamental change beneath the city, as the same project that created public green space also helped bury a watercourse that had physically connected this territory with the Darsena.
Arrigo Arrighetti added the park's most consequential architectural intervention in 1963 with Piscina Solari, using two inclined reinforced-concrete arches to support a saddle-shaped roof formed as a hyperbolic paraboloid. Continuous inclined glazing opened the pool visually toward Casiraghi's greenery, and the compact structural solution became part of Arrighetti's wider exploration of architecture in which engineering and form were treated as a single problem. Milan substantially renewed the surrounding garden in 2004, two years before the former Parco Solari received the name of priest and educator Luigi Giussani, who had founded Comunione e Liberazione. Japanese sculptor Kan Yasuda supplied another permanent layer in 2006 through Porta del Ritorno, placing a smooth abstract stone form among the paths and mature trees. Casiraghi's thirties landscape, Arrighetti's structural experiment and Yasuda's sculpture turned successive interventions separated by more than seventy years into distinct chapters of the same public garden.
How to fold Parco Don Luigi Giussani into your trip.
Parco Don Luigi Giussani works as the anchor for a daytime progression through the railway infrastructure, industrial production and architectural reinvention that reshaped Milan's western districts between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries.
Begin at Porta Genova, inaugurated as Milano Ticinese on January 17, 1870 for the railway toward Mortara, a line consequential enough to prompt the opening of a new passage through Milan's Spanish walls. Renamed Porta Genova in 1923, the station became one of the principal forces behind the industrial development of the territory southwest of the center before regular railway operation ended in December 2025 after more than 155 years. Continue to Ex Ansaldo, whose industrial complex originated in 1904 with Roberto Zust and expanded through successive construction phases before Ansaldo acquired the plant during the 1960s for locomotive, railway-carriage and tram production. Milan acquired the immense property around 1990, beginning its conversion from mechanical production into cultural use as La Scala workshops entered part of the complex and new institutions followed. Conclude at Mudec, born after David Chipperfield won Milan's 1999 competition to place the city's ethnographic collections within the former Ansaldo territory. His project inserted zinc-titanium volumes and a glowing translucent central structure inside the surviving industrial perimeter, culminating in a flower-shaped interior hall before the museum opened during Expo 2015. The progression moves from Porta Genova driving railway expansion through Ansaldo converting that connectivity into industrial production into Chipperfield transforming the inherited factory fabric for culture, extending the same cycle of infrastructural obsolescence and reinvention that produced Parco Don Luigi Giussani.
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