Why you should experience Piscina Romano in Milan, Italy.
Piscina Romano is an expansive interwar swimming complex where Città Studi's academic character meets municipal recreation, Luigi Lorenzo Secchi's architectural experimentation and the exceptional scale of Milan's first major outdoor swimming program.
Set along Via Andrea Maria Ampère near Via Edoardo Bonardi and just steps from Via Giuseppe Ponzio, the swimming complex occupies a broad green enclosure where mature trees, Politecnico buildings, residential streets and freestanding service pavilions interrupt the dense urban blocks extending across Città Studi. A rectangular pool measuring 100 by 40 meters dominates the grounds, creating an immense plane of water within the surrounding park. Symmetrical single-story pavilions with pitched roofs, pediments and lightly articulated facades preserve Secchi's restrained architectural language around the basin. Remnants of the original pergola extend the composition into the planted edges, joining architecture and open-air recreation across a site conceived at metropolitan scale. The result is a swimming complex whose extraordinary proportions preserve Milan's interwar attempt to make organized aquatic recreation a defining component of the expanding modern city.
What you should know about Piscina Romano.
Piscina Romano is best known for Luigi Lorenzo Secchi's transformation of a standardized open-air swimming concept into a 4,000-square-meter public pool that became a prototype for Milan's interwar aquatic architecture. Secchi had graduated in industrial engineering from the Regio Istituto Tecnico Superiore in 1924 and entered municipal practice designing swimming facilities, markets and schools before beginning his five-decade tenure as architectural conservator of Teatro alla Scala. His first realized swimming project emerged in 1928 at the Casa del Sole, where an outdoor pool introduced architectural devices he subsequently developed across larger municipal facilities. Secchi published Le pubbliche piscine all'aperto in Il Politecnico that November, setting out locations, implementation phases, projected costs and a standardized model for a citywide network. The model centered on a 4,000-square-meter basin serving 1,500 swimmers, aligned with a principal services building, changing facilities and smaller shower and lavatory pavilions. Milan intended to invest eleven million lire in three swimming complexes with baths, turning the concept into a broader municipal program. Piscina Romano became its experimental first realization, with construction advancing during 1929 and the complex opening on July 28 before all planned work had been completed. Public response immediately overwhelmed the new facility and forced rapid alterations intended to control unauthorized entry. The pool's exceptional dimensions also gave the experiment international architectural weight: the Ordine degli Architetti di Milano characterizes its basin as Europe's largest when inaugurated. Secchi subsequently developed other Milanese swimming projects from the experience, making Romano the opening statement in a body of recreational architecture that became one of the distinguishing strands of his career.
The complex continued evolving after its 1929 opening through additions that expanded Secchi's original composition. A shallow circular children's pool entered the grounds in 1932, creating a smaller counterpoint to the immense rectangular basin. Surviving graniglia columns along the northern side preserve part of the original pergola, a device Secchi also employed at Casa del Sole and in swimming facilities constructed during 1932 for the municipal heliotherapy colony at Parco Ravizza and the school on Via Mac-Mahon. Two matching service pavilions stand opposite one another at the end of the grounds, their pitched roofs, pediments, pilasters and arched lateral windows giving modest recreational functions a carefully controlled architectural presence. A more elaborate two-story building once formed the principal Via Ponzio entrance, distinguished by three large arched windows, horizontal bands, circular and lobed recesses, pinnacles and a central municipal coat of arms. That building subsequently passed out of the swimming complex, severing the original ceremonial entrance from the recreational grounds behind it. Secchi continued modifying the facility during the 1930s, and surviving drawings include a March 14, 1934 project for an additional changing pavilion. Photographs preserved within his professional archive span 1928 to 1937 and capture construction, completed architecture and swimmers occupying the immense basin. Those drawings and photographs now form part of the Luigi Lorenzo Secchi archive at Politecnico di Milano, connecting the surviving pool with the professional legacy of the architect who later directed reconstruction of La Scala after wartime bombing.
How to fold Piscina Romano into your trip.
Piscina Romano works as the anchor for a daytime exploration of Città Studi through three nearby works that carry the district from an interwar scientific institute through postwar architectural education into Gio Ponti's experimental approach to sacred architecture.
Begin at Istituto di Chimica Industriale, designed by Giulio Carlo Vicoli between 1924 and 1927 as the emerging university district gathered scientific buildings around the new Politecnico campus. Its construction belonged to the first major phase that shifted technical education and scientific research away from Central Milan, following Augusto Brusconi and Gaetano Moretti's 1913 plan for the Politecnico and the definitive campus project developed after the First World War by Francesco Belloni, Giannino Ferrini and Vittorio Verganti. The chemistry institute consequently preceded Piscina Romano by only a few years, preserving the academic construction campaign against which Secchi's immense recreational grounds appeared. Continue to Facoltà di Architettura del Politecnico di Milano, developed between 1953 and 1961 by Giordano Forti, Gio Ponti and Piero Portaluppi as postwar enrollment forced the university beyond its original pavilions. The architects conceived an edificio insegnante whose structure, finishes, construction systems and fittings would turn the building itself into a teaching instrument for architecture students. Only two wings of the intended scheme were completed, leaving its courtyard and Via Andrea Maria Ampère frontage unresolved; one internal staircase nevertheless retained the pedagogical concept by giving successive steps different types of stone. Ponti's faceted ceramic surfaces and diamond-shaped forms extended into the neighboring Trifoglio and Nave, whose free placement along Via Bonardi directly borders Piscina Romano's grounds. Conclude at Chiesa di San Luca Evangelista, Gio Ponti's 1955 to 1961 church farther along Via Andrea Maria Ampère and his first completed religious building in Milan. The commission emerged from a newly established parish that initially worshipped inside a small converted apartment on Via Jommelli before construction began in 1959. Ponti developed a tapered interior directed toward the altar and treated roof and facade surfaces as thin enclosing elements distinct from the supporting structure. San Luca became the first Milanese testing ground for architectural ideas he pursued in later churches, placing religious experimentation within the same district where his university buildings were teaching a new generation of architects. The progression moves from Vicoli's scientific institute through Forti, Ponti and Portaluppi's building conceived as an architectural teaching instrument into Ponti's first Milanese church, placing Piscina Romano within a district where education, recreation and architectural experimentation repeatedly generated new building types.
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