Why you should experience Via Giovanni Battista Pirelli in Milan, Italy.
Via Giovanni Battista Pirelli is a vertical corridor where Centrale's metropolitan character meets postwar office architecture, the unfinished ambitions of Milan's 1953 Centro Direzionale and the industrial legacy of the engineer whose company helped reshape the city.
Running through Centrale between Piazza Duca d'Aosta and Via Melchiorre Gioia, the diagonal corridor crosses Via Fabio Filzi before extending through the high-rise district developed between the railway terminus and Porta Nuova. Slender towers, long office blocks, glazed façades and surviving residential buildings create a sequence dominated by postwar construction, with sharp variations in height revealing successive generations of Milanese architecture. Movement establishes its primary rhythm through the direct connection between Centrale and the Gioia district, placing railway arrivals, offices and residential blocks along a single perspective. Mid-century towers introduce another register farther northwest, where the street enters territory once assigned to an ambitious business center whose partial realization left individual buildings standing as fragments of a larger urban conception. The result is a corridor where Milan's industrial inheritance and postwar metropolitan ambitions remain embedded in one of the city's densest concentrations of twentieth-century architecture.
What you should know about Via Giovanni Battista Pirelli.
Via Giovanni Battista Pirelli is best known for forming one of the principal surviving axes of Milan's postwar Centro Direzionale, a project conceived in the 1953 city plan between Stazione Centrale and the future Porta Garibaldi railway terminus. The scheme sought to shift major office functions north of the historic center and organize them around two major road axes, a metropolitan line and the new railway station, concentrating a new generation of tall buildings across the Garibaldi-Repubblica-Melchiorre Gioia territory. Via Pirelli developed across ground already transformed by the 1931 closure of the old Centrale, when Via Carlini was extended toward Melchiorre Gioia and the railway landscape north of Piazza della Repubblica began to open for redevelopment. The corridor took the name of Giovanni Battista Pirelli, the Varenna-born engineer who moved to Milan in 1861, studied industrial engineering under Giuseppe Colombo and graduated from the future Politecnico in 1870 with the highest marks in his section. Pirelli founded G.B. Pirelli & C. on January 28, 1872, then began rubber production the following year on Via Ponte Seveso, present Via Fabio Filzi, with 40 workers and five employees in a 1,000-square-meter factory beside the Sevesetto. Bombing severely damaged that factory in 1943, and the company subsequently commissioned its 127-meter headquarters on the former industrial property beside the southern entrance to the street. Farther along Via Pirelli, construction associated with the Centro Direzionale produced buildings including the residential block at number 19 in 1958 and the twin 13-story towers at numbers 30 and 32 during the 1960s, the latter conceived above a shared commercial and office base. The planned district remained incomplete, leaving Via Pirelli as one of the clearest built fragments of a metropolitan center whose projected scale extended far beyond the architecture ultimately realized.
A separate architectural mechanism survives at Via Giovanni Battista Pirelli 39 in the Torre dei Servizi Tecnici Comunali, conceived through a national competition launched in 1955 and won by Vittorio Gandolfi, Renato Bazzoni, Luigi Fratino and Aldo Putelli. The project developed as two parallel bodies connected by a common section: a faceted office tower rising twenty-six levels above ground and a four-level bridge volume spanning Via Melchiorre Gioia. Lower public-facing functions were concentrated in the horizontal block, and offices requiring less direct public access occupied the tower, allowing circulation requirements to generate two sharply different architectural forms within a single commission. Construction extended from 1955 to 1966, producing a 90-meter high-rise that became one of the strongest realizations of the Centro Direzionale before the larger scheme lost momentum. The building later became known as the Pirellino, and an international competition launched in 2019 drew 359 architecture, landscape and engineering practices from fifteen countries for its redevelopment. Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Stefano Boeri Architetti won with a proposal retaining the existing tower and bridge structure and introducing a new tower and greenhouse element. Number 39 consequently compresses two distant architectural episodes into one site, beginning with Gandolfi, Bazzoni, Fratino and Putelli's response to Milan's postwar high-rise ambitions and continuing through a twenty-first-century intervention centered on the preservation and extension of that inherited structure.
How to fold Via Giovanni Battista Pirelli into your trip.
Via Giovanni Battista Pirelli works as the anchor to an exploration of northeastern Central Milan through a nineteenth-century church built beside the city's first Centrale, the concealed railway platform used for deportations during the German occupation and a scientific institution created through Ulrico Hoepli's gift to his adopted city.
Begin at Chiesa di San Gioachimo, commissioned in 1880 by Archbishop Luigi Nazari di Calabiana and completed by Enrico Terzaghi in 1885 beside the Centrale railway station then occupying present Piazza della Repubblica. Terzaghi organized the Neo-Renaissance church around a Greek-cross plan beneath a polygonal tiburium, and the opening of Piazza San Gioachimo during the 1920s altered an orientation originally directed toward Via Galileo Galilei and the railway underpasses. Continue to Memoriale della Shoah di Milano, occupying the former postal-wagon handling area beneath Stazione Centrale where Jewish prisoners and political opponents were loaded into freight cars between 1943 and 1945 before the wagons were raised to the operating tracks above. The first Jewish convoy departed on December 6, 1943 with 169 prisoners, only five of whom returned, and the January 30, 1944 transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau included thirteen-year-old Liliana Segre; the preserved railway mechanism now forms the physical core of a memorial conceived for the site beginning in 2004. Conclude at Planetario Ulrico Hoepli, donated to Milan by publisher Ulrico Hoepli in 1929 and designed by Piero Portaluppi with scientific direction from Emilio Bianchi of the Brera Observatory. The octagonal building opened on May 20, 1930 around a Zeiss Model II projector beneath a 19.6-meter dome; custodian Aldo Venturi secretly dismantled and hid the instrument at Limbiate before the 1943 bombing damaged the building, preserving the machine through the war. The progression moves from Terzaghi's church beside Milan's first Centrale through the concealed railway machinery appropriated for deportation and onward to Portaluppi and Hoepli's architecture for astronomical education, connecting nineteenth-century urban expansion, wartime history and scientific culture across the districts surrounding Via Giovanni Battista Pirelli.
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