Via dei Giardini, Milan

Why you should experience Via dei Giardini in Milan, Italy.

Via dei Giardini is a secluded corridor where Brera's aristocratic character meets historic private gardens, postwar Milanese architecture and a street carved through one of the center's largest former green estates.

Running through Brera between Via Alessandro Manzoni and Piazza Cavour, the gently curving corridor occupies a green interior zone behind the palaces of Via Borgonuovo and the formal street fronts of Milan's historic center. Mature trees, garden walls, recessed residences and intermittent views into planted grounds give the street a low-density physical character unusual within blocks so close to Montenapoleone. Movement establishes its primary rhythm through the alternation of enclosed walls and architecture deliberately positioned among surviving trees, allowing individual buildings to emerge as freestanding compositions within fragments of older estates. Mid-century residences introduce another register through projecting balconies, broad glazing and structures shaped around inherited gardens after the street divided land previously joined behind the surrounding palaces. The result is a corridor whose unusual quiet and architectural spacing derive directly from the private gardens through which Milan opened the street during the twentieth century.

What you should know about Via dei Giardini.

Via dei Giardini is best known for being opened through a historic concentration of private gardens whose origins reached back to the suppressed Monastery of Sant'Erasmo. The Perego di Cremnago family acquired the former monastic gardens in the late eighteenth century and incorporated them into property extending behind its residence on Via Borgonuovo. Luigi Canonica designed the Perego garden in 1778 around rectangular parterres and an elliptical fishpond, adding a Neo-Gothic greenhouse to a composition initially governed by formal geometry. Head gardener Luigi Villoresi subsequently remade the grounds in the English manner under Canonica's direction, removing the fishpond and greenhouse and creating open clearings within a less rigid landscape. The neighboring Palazzo Borromeo d'Adda possessed another major private garden, and the two green properties formed a continuous interior landscape before the street divided them. Pressure for a stronger connection between Milan's railway stations and the center intensified redevelopment proposals from 1925, placing these gardens directly within plans for a new route. A 1940 agreement between the Comune di Milano and the Perego family transferred a long strip for the street and placed the separated northern section of the garden into public ownership, with the intervention completed in 1941. The surviving Giardino Perego covers 4,200 square meters and retains a late eighteenth-century statue of Vertumnus by Grazioso Rusca, the sole sculpture from the original decorative group left on the property. Via dei Giardini consequently owes its existence, name and unusual spatial character to the physical subdivision of aristocratic green estates whose surviving fragments still determine the corridor's form.

A separate architectural chapter emerged after the street opened, when Carlo De Carli and Antonio Carminati used its irregular plots for two important postwar residential commissions. Their building at Via dei Giardini 7 dates from 1947 to 1950 and was developed with structural consultant Ernesto Saliva on the curved corner with Piazza Sant'Erasmo. Its reinforced-concrete structure was recessed behind continuous loggias, freeing the façades from the supporting frame, and the upper residences were drawn back behind terraces and planting as a “villa pensile.” A glazed raised entrance established a visual axis through the building toward Piazza Sant'Erasmo and a surviving fragment of the former monastic cloister restored after wartime damage. De Carli and Carminati returned to Via dei Giardini in 1952 for number 16, commissioned by Società Immobiliare Alvisco on land formerly belonging to the Palazzo Borromeo d'Adda garden. The design was constrained by a 1940 agreement limiting construction to the dimensions of an urban villa with a maximum height of thirteen meters, leading to a three-story residence surrounded by the inherited greenery. An octagonal volume containing the living rooms projected into the garden, and a mature plane tree beside the street was retained as part of the architectural composition. The two commissions turned parcels created by the subdivision of historic gardens into an unusually concentrated demonstration of De Carli and Carminati's postwar residential work, linking the new street's architectural development to the landscape conditions that had preceded it.

How to fold Via dei Giardini into your trip.

Via dei Giardini works as the anchor to an exploration of Central Milan through a nineteenth-century house museum assembled by a patriot collector, an aristocratic residence transferred intact to the city and a 1930s villa commissioned by a Lombard industrial family.

Begin at Museo Poldi Pezzoli, where Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli used an inherited fortune and the collecting culture of his Trivulzio family connections to construct one of Milan's defining nineteenth-century private collections. His support for the 1848 uprising led to exile, travels through Switzerland, France and England exposed him to European collecting practice, and his return in 1849 initiated the house-museum project developed with figures including Giuseppe Balzaretto, Giuseppe Bertini, Luigi Scrosati and Filippo Peroni; his collection passed to public use after his death, with the museum opening in 1881. Continue to Palazzo Morando, a residence built near the end of the sixteenth century and subsequently occupied by generations of Milanese noble families before Lydia Caprara di Montalba and Gian Giacomo Morando Attendolo Bolognini made it their home in 1903. Lydia's 1945 tribute transferred the palace and its furnishings to Milan for museum use, preserving eighteenth and nineteenth-century decorated rooms alongside collections that now include historic views of the city and municipal holdings of dress and accessories spanning the seventeenth through early twenty-first centuries. Conclude at Villa Necchi Campiglio, commissioned in the early 1930s from Piero Portaluppi by Angelo Campiglio and sisters Gigina and Nedda Necchi, members of the Lombard industrial bourgeoisie. Portaluppi controlled the commission from the main residence to its surrounding structures and interiors, producing a complete metropolitan villa whose later history carried a private family project into Milan's cultural patrimony. The progression moves from Poldi Pezzoli's transformation of private collecting into public inheritance through Lydia Morando's transfer of an aristocratic residence to the city and onward to Portaluppi's architectural conception for the Necchi Campiglio family, connecting three distinct forms of Milanese patronage across the historic center.

MAKE IT REAL