Why you should experience Rinascente Milano in Milan, Italy.
Rinascente Milano is a storied department store where Duomo's fashion culture, Italian design, commercial experimentation and postwar reinvention converge within an institution that helped define modern retail in Italy.
Set along Piazza del Duomo near Via Santa Radegonda and just steps from Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, the department store occupies the same site chosen by Luigi and Ferdinando Bocconi in 1889 for their pioneering Milanese emporium, placing contemporary shopping inside a commercial lineage established when the cathedral square was becoming the grand center of the newly unified city. Successive floors move through fashion, beauty, interiors and food before the upper level opens directly toward the cathedral, allowing the building's commercial world to culminate against the marble spires outside. A reconstruction completed in 1950 gave the store escalators, expansive display windows and interiors conceived for a new era of metropolitan consumption, and later interventions repeatedly reworked those spaces around changing ideas of fashion and design. The result is a department store where more than a century of Italian retail culture remains inseparable from the architectural and cultural reinvention of Piazza del Duomo.
What you should know about Rinascente Milano.
Rinascente Milano is best known for evolving from the Bocconi brothers' nineteenth-century retail experiment into an institution whose history repeatedly intersected with major figures in Italian architecture, graphic design and industrial culture. Luigi and Ferdinando Bocconi began with a fabric and clothing shop on Via Santa Radegonda in 1865, expanded into the Paris-inspired Aux Villes d'Italie in 1877 and commissioned Giovanni Giachi to create a new Piazza del Duomo store that opened on October 22, 1889 with three large facades, iron columns, tall windows and a grand central staircase. Senatore Borletti acquired the business in 1917 and turned to Gabriele D'Annunzio for a new name, producing La Rinascente and an association with rebirth that became brutally literal when fire destroyed the Piazza Duomo store only days after its December 7, 1918 reopening. World War II devastated the building again, leaving the flagship unusable and forcing another reconstruction before it reopened on December 4, 1950. Ferdinando Reggiori designed the new exterior, Carlo Pagani shaped the entrances, windows, interiors and furnishings, Aldo Molteni directed the building work and Max Huber created the new lR mark. Pagani brought Massimo Campigli into the Via San Raffaele entrance for a large mosaic, incorporated Piero Fornasetti's brightly lacquered panels into the women's clothing department and developed the Milan commission into a relationship with Rinascente lasting more than two decades. Destruction, reconstruction and collaboration with some of postwar Italy's most consequential creative practitioners turned the Piazza Duomo flagship into far more than a surviving commercial address.
The store's influence soon extended into the development of Italian design itself. Rinascente created the Compasso d'Oro in 1954 from an idea associated with Gio Ponti and Alberto Rosselli, establishing a prize devoted to outstanding industrial products at the moment Italian manufacturing was entering its great postwar expansion. Bruno Munari's Zizì monkey and Marcello Nizzoli's Olivetti Lettera 22 belonged to the first winning group, and the second edition drew 1,300 submissions from 280 companies before responsibility for the prize later passed to ADI. Rinascente received its own Compasso d'Oro career award in 1967 for promoting Italian design and establishing the prize. Fashion produced an equally consequential succession: Giorgio Armani began his career at the Piazza Duomo store in 1957, Ottavio and Rosita Missoni presented Milano-Simpathy there in 1958, and Pierre Cardin presented a dress inside a department store there in 1963. The flagship entered another reinvention from 2006 through spaces involving India Mahdavi, Studio Mumbai, Rodolfo Dordoni and Vincent Van Duysen, followed by the Food Hall in 2007 and a Design Supermarket carrying more than 200 brands in 2009. IGDS named the Piazza Duomo flagship the world's best department store in 2016, giving international recognition to a Milanese institution whose influence had already moved from retail into fashion and industrial design.
How to fold Rinascente Milano into your trip.
Rinascente Milano works as the anchor for a daytime progression through Habsburg court architecture, twentieth-century Italian art and the grand commercial passage that recast Piazza del Duomo after national unification.
Begin at Palazzo Reale, whose transformation under Giuseppe Piermarini between 1770 and 1778 replaced much of the older ducal character with a Neoclassical royal residence. Piermarini demolished the entrance wing, opened the principal courtyard toward the cathedral and worked with figures including Martino Knoller, Giocondo Albertolli and Giuseppe Maggiolini, creating the palace from which rulers including Napoleon later governed and staged court life. Continue to Museo del Novecento inside the Palazzo dell'Arengario, conceived by Enrico Agostino Griffini, Pier Giulio Magistretti, Giovanni Muzio and Piero Portaluppi before Gruppo Rota converted one tower for Milan's twentieth-century art collections. The museum opened in 2010 with more than 300 works selected from civic holdings exceeding 4,000 pieces, and its great spiral ramp climbs from metro level toward a terrace facing the cathedral, binding the art collection physically to Piazza del Duomo. Conclude at Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Giuseppe Mengoni's immense glass-and-iron commercial passage linking Piazza del Duomo with Piazza della Scala, whose construction turned shopping into a grand component of Milan's nineteenth-century civic center. The first stone was laid in 1865, the passage opened within three years and its octagonal crossing became an architectural expression of the commercial confidence that subsequently drew the Bocconi brothers to the adjoining square. The progression moves from Piermarini reshaping dynastic power through the Arengario acquiring a second life for modern art into Mengoni monumentalizing commerce beside the Duomo, revealing the architectural conditions that eventually made Piazza del Duomo the natural home for Rinascente Milano.
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