Why you should experience Piazza del Tricolore in Milan, Italy.
Piazza del Tricolore is a layered urban gateway where Porta Monforte's residential character meets the vanished nineteenth-century customs gate, Aligi Sassu's sculptural fountain and the contemporary transport axis connecting Central Milan with its eastern districts.
Set along Corso Monforte near Viale Bianca Maria and just steps from Corso Concordia, the piazza occupies an irregular planted junction where mature conifers, residential palazzi, tram infrastructure and broad radial streets mark the transition from the compact blocks around San Babila into the longer avenues of Porta Monforte. Corso Monforte enters from the historic center before Corso Concordia carries the same eastward line toward Piazza Risorgimento and Corso Indipendenza. Viale Bianca Maria and Viale Premuda cross that axis along the former perimeter of the city, preserving a wider north-south corridor through the surrounding residential fabric. Aligi Sassu's fountain rises inside a small garden at the center, giving the traffic junction a concentrated sculptural focus amid the converging streets. The result is a compact square where vanished boundaries, radial avenues and contemporary transport infrastructure preserve successive stages in Milan's expansion eastward.
What you should know about Piazza del Tricolore.
Piazza del Tricolore is best known for occupying the site of Porta Monforte, the final gate created along Milan's customs boundary as the city extended new radial avenues beyond the former Spanish bastions. The new passage continued the axis of the medieval Pusterla di Monforte and responded to the outward expansion formalized during the period of Cesare Beruto's first regulatory plan. Porta Monforte was completed on October 24, 1888, establishing a direct continuation from Corso Monforte toward the developing territory east of the city. Two customs houses stood within the present piazza, joined by an iron gate divided by four iron piers crowned with gas lamps. The opening remained secondary within Milan's customs system since no major interurban road terminated there, yet its position established the starting point for a new radial avenue through the expanding district. Corso Concordia received its name in 1893 as part of a linked sequence with Piazza Risorgimento and Corso Indipendenza, embedding the political language of Italian unification into the new street system. Abolition of the customs boundary stripped Porta Monforte of its original function, and Milan ordered demolition of the two gatehouses in 1919. Removal opened the former threshold into the piazza that survives, leaving the geometry of Corso Monforte and Corso Concordia as the clearest physical inheritance of the vanished gate. The name Piazza del Tricolore later shifted the site from the memory of a customs entrance toward a national reference embedded within the surrounding Risorgimento street names.
A second sequence of interventions converted the former gate site into a commemorative and transport space. Aligi Sassu designed the fountain dedicated to the Guardia di Finanza, inaugurated on April 25, 1985 during the fortieth anniversary of the Liberation. Six stainless-steel cylindrical columns of different heights rise from a base of white Montorfano granite, with a large bird positioned above the tallest cylinder and water descending around the composition. The surrounding garden later received the name of Milanese writer Luigi Santucci, placing Sassu's sculpture within a small planted enclosure at the center of the road junction. Milan subsequently selected the piazza for Tricolore station on Metro Line 4, bringing underground railway construction to ground once occupied by the customs gate. Tricolore opened with San Babila on July 4, 2023, extending M4 from Linate Airport into the center and reducing the journey between Linate and San Babila to twelve minutes. The opening brought eight M4 stations into operation and established a direct rail connection through Repetti, Stazione Forlanini, Argonne, Susa, Dateo and Tricolore before San Babila. Completion of the surface works restored the Corso Concordia approach after years of construction, adding a new transport layer beneath an urban threshold first established more than a century earlier.
How to fold Piazza del Tricolore into your trip.
Piazza del Tricolore works as the anchor for a daytime exploration through Porta Monforte and the Quadrilatero del Silenzio using three nearby sites that move from a Renaissance suburban residence through a Liberty architect's private experiment into Giulio Ulisse Arata's collaboration with leading Milanese decorative artists.
Begin at Palazzo Isimbardi, whose earliest surviving historical reference comes from the 1497 tribute of Marchese Gerolamo Parravicino. The first nucleus stood outside Milan's walls along the Monforte road within the Viridarium, the cultivated territory whose association with gardens survives in the name Via Vivaio. Successive owners reshaped the country residence before the Isimbardi family acquired it in 1775 and commissioned interiors with stucco, lacquered doors, Venetian-style chandeliers and paintings devoted to family history. The Province of Milan acquired the building during the 1930s; wartime bombing struck its northwestern portion in 1943, followed by Ferdinando Reggiori's reconstruction between 1950 and 1953. Continue to Casa Campanini, designed by Alfredo Campanini for his own residence between 1904 and 1906 as Milanese Liberty architecture entered one of its richest periods. Campanini controlled the building beyond its principal architectural scheme, developing decorative components that extended from polychrome glass and facade sculpture into interior furnishings. Michele Vedani created the cement figures flanking the entrance, whose treatment responded to Giuseppe Sommaruga's earlier Palazzo Castiglioni. Alessandro Mazzucotelli executed Campanini's wrought-iron designs, including the entrance gate, joining architectural form and metalwork across a residence that became one of Campanini's principal experiments. Conclude at Palazzo Berri Meregalli, built between 1911 and 1913 by Giulio Ulisse Arata for the Berri Meregalli family on the corner of Via Cappuccini and Via Vivaio. Arata combined exposed brick, stone arches and loggias with floral ornament, sculpted figures and geometric mosaics, drawing several artistic disciplines into a single residential commission. Alessandro Mazzucotelli contributed wrought iron, Adamo Rimoldi and Angiolo D'Andrea supplied pictorial decoration and mosaics, and sculptors Calegari and Attilio Prendoni worked across the exterior. Adolfo Wildt added the gilded marble Vittoria Alata in 1919, connecting the building's interior decoration with the conclusion of the First World War. The progression moves from a fifteenth-century country residence on the Monforte road through Campanini's integrated Liberty house into Arata's collaboration with Mazzucotelli, Wildt and other artists, revealing how the territory around Piazza del Tricolore changed from Milan's cultivated fringe into one of its richest concentrations of early twentieth-century residential architecture.
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