Why you should experience Via Filippo Turati in Milan, Italy.
Via Filippo Turati is a stately corridor where Brera's institutional character meets Milan's first Central Station, nineteenth-century metropolitan expansion and an exceptional concentration of twentieth-century architecture.
Running through Brera between Piazza Cavour and Piazza della Repubblica, the rectilinear corridor occupies the direct connection created between the historic center and Milan's former railway terminus. Stone palazzi near Piazza Cavour yield northward to Rationalist offices, postwar residential blocks and high-rise construction, giving successive stretches a distinctly different architectural scale. Tram tracks establish its primary rhythm through a street whose generous width originated in the demands of railway-era circulation, preserving the linear movement that determined its creation during the 1860s. Corporate architecture introduces another register around Largo Guido Donegani and Piazza della Repubblica, where major Milanese architects used offices, residences and towers to test new approaches to the modern city. The result is a corridor whose architecture traces the conversion of a purpose-built railway approach into one of Central Milan's richest concentrations of nineteenth and twentieth-century urban design.
What you should know about Via Filippo Turati.
Via Filippo Turati is best known for originating as Via Principe Umberto, the new artery created to connect Central Milan directly with the first Stazione Centrale after the railway terminal opened on the site of present Piazza della Repubblica. The project required a route across ground previously occupied by gardens and agricultural plots between Piazza Cavour and the railway, and its northern section passed beneath the Spanish bastions through a dedicated underpass. Emilio Balzaretto directed construction of that crossing, whose excavation began on April 28, 1864 and whose cast-iron supports were manufactured in Brussels in a Second Empire design. The complete street entered service in 1866, establishing a direct approach between the medieval Porta Nuova area and a railway station whose position had previously lacked a corresponding radial route into the city. Its first road surface also became an experiment in Milanese street engineering: Adda gravel compressed by a granite roller formed a convex carriageway beside raised granite sidewalks, but complaints about mud and dust led to cobblestone resurfacing in 1870. The railway connection lost its original purpose when the present Stazione Centrale opened in 1931, releasing extensive ground around Piazza della Repubblica and the northern end of the street for redevelopment. That change prepared Via Filippo Turati for a second metropolitan role, with the former station approach becoming a principal route into the office district that emerged between Brera and Piazza della Repubblica during the following decades.
Gio Ponti converted that new commercial importance into one of Milan's decisive office commissions when Montecatini president Guido Donegani commissioned a headquarters expansion between Via Filippo Turati and Via Moscova in 1935. Ponti worked with Antonio Fornaroli and Eugenio Soncini on a building intended for 1,500 employees, using the irregular trapezoidal plot to develop an H-shaped plan whose central section concentrated executive offices and whose elongated wings distributed the remaining workplaces at comparable distances from management. Construction followed between 1936 and 1938, and the building turned its long lateral elevation toward Via Filippo Turati, making the street frontage central to the composition even though the principal entrance faced Largo Donegani. Postwar development carried the architectural experiment north when Gustavo and Vito Latis completed Via Filippo Turati 7 between 1953 and 1955 for Società Immobiliare Montebello on ground formerly occupied by the park of the Treccani degli Alfieri family. Their reinforced-concrete building combined shops, offices and residences, placing commercial premises beneath a long projecting canopy, offices on the first level and four apartments on successive residential floors, with the principal living rooms oriented toward a large internal garden. Giovanni and Lorenzo Muzio extended the sequence upward at Via Filippo Turati 40 through Torre Turati, commissioned by Reale Mutua Assicurazioni and developed between 1963 and 1968 as one of two towers intended to frame entry to the new financial district at Piazza della Repubblica. The nineteen-story tower rises from a two-level base, places offices across its first eleven tower levels and residences across the upper eight, using prefabricated reinforced-concrete panels with marble aggregate to establish the gridded exterior. Three successive commissions consequently turned the former railway approach into a concentrated demonstration of Milanese architecture across the Rationalist and postwar periods, with Ponti, the Latis brothers and the Muzios responding to the street through radically different combinations of work, commerce and residence.
How to fold Via Filippo Turati into your trip.
Via Filippo Turati works as the anchor to an exploration of northeastern Central Milan through a Neoclassical villa built for an aristocratic patron, a natural-history museum created after the 1881 national exhibition and a private residence commissioned by an industrial family during the interwar period.
Begin at Galleria d'Arte Moderna, housed in the Villa Belgiojoso built between 1790 and 1796 for Count Lodovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso from a design by Austrian architect Leopoldo Pollack, a collaborator of Giuseppe Piermarini. The French government acquired the residence in 1804 for Napoleon, the Italian Crown later inherited it after unification and municipal acquisition in 1920 prepared the building for the modern-art collections that entered in 1921, converting an aristocratic residence into a public museum through more than a century of political change. Continue to Museo Civico di Storia Naturale, whose present building originated after the pavilions of Milan's 1881 national exhibition were dismantled and the surrounding territory was assigned to public gardens. Giovanni Ceruti received the commission for the new museum, completed his design in 1888 and finished construction in 1893, adopting a polychrome composition drawing on medieval architectural traditions already associated with natural-history museums in cities including Oxford, London, Washington and New York. Conclude at Villa Necchi Campiglio, designed by Piero Portaluppi between 1932 and 1935 for Angelo Campiglio and sisters Gigina and Nedda Necchi on ground carved from the former Serbelloni gardens. Tomaso Buzzi later reshaped several interiors, and the house passed to FAI through the 2001 donation of the Necchi sisters before receiving the de' Micheli, Claudia Gian Ferrari and Guido Sforni collections, bringing works associated with artists including Tiepolo, Canaletto, Sironi, De Chirico, Martini, Wildt, Picasso, Fontana, Modigliani and Matisse into the domestic architecture. The progression moves from Pollack's aristocratic Neoclassicism through Ceruti's purpose-built museum architecture and onward to Portaluppi's interwar residence and its later art collections, tracing three distinct relationships between private patronage, public culture and architectural experimentation around Via Filippo Turati.
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