Why you should experience Santeria Toscana 31 in Milan, Italy.
Santeria Toscana 31 is a multidisciplinary live-music venue where Vigentino's industrial past, Milan's independent cultural scene, European artist development and the conversion of a disused automobile dealership converge inside a thousand-square-meter creative complex.
Set along Viale Toscana near Via Giuseppe Ripamonti and just steps from Università Bocconi, the venue occupies a former automobile dealership on Milan's southern ring road, transformed into a sprawling cultural complex after Santeria won a municipal competition for the property. A 250-square-meter theater with a 40-square-meter stage sits beside a 135-square-meter bar and restaurant, an atelier, training room and meeting spaces, allowing concerts to coexist with exhibitions, courses, talks and smaller performances across distinct rooms. The main hall holds 560 standing spectators and operates with a resident concert system built around twelve Bose ShowMatch DeltaQ array modules, eight SMS118 subwoofers, Powersoft amplification and a Midas M32 front-of-house console. The result is a Vigentino venue where a former commercial building has become both a technically substantial concert room and a working cultural complex, extending the smaller Santeria model established across Milan in 2011 into a far more ambitious scale.
What you should know about Santeria Toscana 31.
Santeria Toscana 31 is best known for turning a disused automobile dealership into a 560-capacity concert venue that became Italy's first representative within the European Liveurope network. Santeria began as an S.r.l. formed by cultural operators in 2010 and opened its first public venue at Via Paladini 8 in March 2011. Andrea Pontiroli brought experience founding Circolo Magnolia, and Riccardo Negri arrived as a founding member of ARCI Magnolia and Godzillamarket before becoming one of Santeria's founders. Filippo Anglano followed the same Magnolia connection into Santeria and founded WET Studio in 2015 as the group's internal creative department. Via Paladini became the small-scale prototype for a larger project when Santeria Social Club won the October 2014 competition to manage one thousand square meters of municipal property on Viale Toscana. The team invested €1.5 million and spent seven months converting the former dealership. Bar operations opened on November 9, 2015, followed by the theater on December 31. Its first full year immediately demonstrated the scale of the experiment. The bar hosted 87 live concerts and 72 DJ sets during 2016, all free, and the theater added 33 concerts and 11 DJ sets attended by more than 15,700 people. Across those programs, 316 musicians, bands and DJs ranged from jazz and classical music through rock, pop, metal and electronic music. Early bookings included Acid Mothers Temple, Awesome Tapes from Africa and Blixa Bargeld with Teho Teardo, and the theater hosted the Italian date of Minor Victories with Rachel Goswell of Slowdive and Stuart Braithwaite of Mogwai. Club To Club brought Powell and Not Waving into the building during its 2016 Milan program, and Linecheck presented Shablo and Mace's Avantguardia audiovisual project there the same year. By 2019 the theater alone was presenting 90 concerts, 19 club nights and 20 theater or comedy performances, with another 41 live sets and 57 DJ sets taking place in the bar. Santeria later became Italy's first representative in Liveurope, the European platform supporting circulation of emerging musicians, and Davide Ragazzoni has directed its Milan music programming since 2023 as Santeria's Italian delegate to the network.
The theater concentrates the venue's technical work into a 250-square-meter room where a 40-square-meter stage faces a standing audience of 560 or a seated configuration of 200. Twelve Bose ShowMatch DeltaQ modules divide the main system across SM5, SM10 and SM20 units, allowing different dispersion patterns to work together across the hall. Eight Bose SMS118 subwoofers supply the low-frequency section, joined by RMU108 infills for coverage closer to the stage. Two Powersoft X8 amplifiers drive the principal system through Armonia remote control, with a Bose PowerShareX PSX2404D assigned to the infills. A Midas M32 console equipped with a DN32 Dante card handles front-of-house mixing and connects to a Midas DL32 digital stagebox backstage. DJ performances use a Pioneer DJM900 mixer with two CDJ-2000NXS2 players, and two Technics 1210 MK2 turntables retain an analog route for vinyl sets. The smaller bar carries its own ten-square-meter stage, allowing jazz, acoustic performances and DJ programming to run separately from ticketed theater shows. Santeria Toscana 31 uses that division to move music between intimate free performances and full concert production without forcing both scales onto the same stage.
How to fold Santeria Toscana 31 into your trip.
Santeria Toscana 31 works as the evening endpoint for an afternoon tracing Rationalist university architecture, interwar public recreation and the conversion of southern Milanese industry into contemporary art institutions.
Begin at Università Bocconi, where enrollment growth during the 1930s led the university from its original Via Statuto home to land around the former San Celso gasworks that Milan intended to redevelop. Giuseppe Pagano and Giangiacomo Predaval developed the new headquarters between 1937 and 1941, breaking from the enclosed courtyard model through a cruciform arrangement influenced by Walter Gropius's Bauhaus building in Dessau. Pagano, then director of Casabella, carried the project through substantial criticism before the Via Sarfatti headquarters opened on December 21, 1941. Continue to Bagni Misteriosi, created in 1939 as Centro Balneare Caimi under municipal engineer Luigi Lorenzo Secchi. A 50-meter pool and a semicircular basin formed the center of the complex before prolonged closure left it unused; Fondazione Pier Lombardo assumed responsibility for its revival in 2013, with Michele De Lucchi and collaborators restoring the pools and introducing structures that support outdoor performances connected with Teatro Franco Parenti. Conclude at Fondazione Prada, where OMA under Rem Koolhaas converted a distillery dating to the 1910s into a 19,000-square-meter arts complex. Seven former warehouses, laboratories and brewing silos remain within the project beside the new Podium, Cinema and Torre, with the Milan headquarters opening in 2015 and the 60-meter Torre completing the architectural campaign in 2018. The progression moves from Pagano and Predaval's Rationalist university through Secchi's municipal swimming complex into Koolhaas and OMA's former distillery, following three successive reinventions of Milan's southern territory around Santeria Toscana 31.
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