Why you should experience Via Mauro Macchi in Milan, Italy.
Via Mauro Macchi is a layered corridor where Centrale's metropolitan character meets early twentieth-century residential expansion, industrial enterprise and the architectural growth that accompanied Milan's principal railway gateway.
Running through Centrale between Via Vitruvio and Viale Brianza, the long corridor occupies a parallel course to the railway approaches before terminating near the transition toward Loreto. Early twentieth-century apartment houses establish much of its architectural scale through stone bases, decorated portals, projecting balconies and continuous street walls, joined farther north by postwar residential blocks and recessed construction. Movement between the station district and Loreto establishes its primary rhythm, carrying the corridor across the tighter blocks around Via Scarlatti toward the more open intersections near Via Palestrina and Via Venini. Internal courtyards introduce another register behind the continuous façades, preserving the deep residential parcels created as this former outer district absorbed successive waves of housing and commercial development. The result is a corridor where architecture from several phases of Milan's twentieth-century growth compresses the expansion of the Centrale district into a continuous northbound street.
What you should know about Via Mauro Macchi.
Via Mauro Macchi is best known for carrying the name of the Milan-born journalist, patriot and parliamentarian whose political career developed from Carlo Cattaneo's intellectual circle into the institutions of unified Italy. Born in 1818, Macchi studied letters and law at the University of Pavia before becoming one of Cattaneo's closest collaborators and serving as editorial secretary during the first series of Il Politecnico, begun in 1839. Austrian authorities repeatedly arrested him for his political activity, and exile followed in January 1848 before his return to Milan during the revolutionary year. Macchi subsequently edited Il Proletario between July and September 1849 and established a Sunday school where workers received free instruction in political history and morality, linking his journalism with an enduring concern for popular education. He founded the republican newspaper L'Italia in Genoa in 1850, returned to Milan in 1859 and entered parliamentary life after unification, sitting through successive legislatures before his appointment to the Senate on March 16, 1879. His published work extended from journalism into history through the two-volume Storia del Consiglio dei dieci of 1847 to 1849 and the Storia del Parlamento subalpino, issued in Milan between 1867 and 1870. Macchi died in Rome on December 24, 1880, leaving Cremona an annual income of 800 lire for popular instruction, a final connection between the educational commitment of his exile years and his later public career.
A separate history developed along the street through enterprises that selected Via Mauro Macchi as Milan expanded around the new Central Station district. The chemical concern Lepetit transferred from Via Lazzaretto 11 to Via Mauro Macchi 7 in 1933, marking the address during the period when the company developed into an important pharmaceutical producer. Stigler-Otis established its legal headquarters at number 28 after Otis incorporated the Milanese Officine Meccaniche Stigler in 1947, combining an American elevator company with a local mechanical manufacturer whose origins preceded the merger. Another commercial operation occupied number 42, where Calzificio Valle Olona maintained its Milan warehouses and sales offices for an enterprise begun in 1930 with factories at Somma Lombardo and Vedano, a workforce of some 200 and hosiery exported as far as Egypt. Postwar construction eventually altered the corridor's northern end through the ECA complex at numbers 70 and 72, won by Co.Ge.Co. in a nineteen-company competition after its November 29, 1960 proposal with Gigi Ghò. Construction ran from 1962 to 1967, with Ghò collaborating with L. Caluzzi and E. Veronelli on a composition established by a nine-story block along Viale Brianza and two lower perpendicular wings. Bicolored litoceramic façades, a Serizzo base, hammered-concrete lintels, bow windows, balconies and loggias carried the project's residential architecture across the corner, closing a sequence in which pharmaceutical, mechanical, textile and building enterprises successively occupied Via Mauro Macchi.
How to fold Via Mauro Macchi into your trip.
Via Mauro Macchi works as the anchor to an exploration of eastern Central Milan through a plague chapel designed for an immense quarantine enclosure, a Liberty residence created after that enclosure disappeared and a private twentieth-century art collection preserved inside a Piero Portaluppi building.
Begin at Chiesa di San Carlo al Lazzaretto, where Carlo Borromeo commissioned Pellegrino Tibaldi after the plague of 1576 to replace the earlier altar standing at the center of Milan's vast Lazzaretto. Tibaldi conceived an octagonal structure open on all sides so quarantined patients surrounding the central court could follow Mass from their cells, and the building survived the later demolition of the enclosure that had once contained nearly 300 rooms around its perimeter. Continue to Casa Galimberti, commissioned by brothers Angelo and Emilio Galimberti from Giovanni Battista Bossi and built between 1903 and 1905 on ground previously occupied by the Società Anonima degli Omnibus. Bossi covered more than 170 square meters of its façades with fire-painted ceramic decoration executed by Pio Pinzauti and Ferdinando Brambilla, combining those figurative surfaces with floral cement work and elaborate wrought iron as the former transport ground entered the residential city. Conclude at Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano, occupying the second-floor apartment where Antonio Boschi and Marieda Di Stefano assembled a collection exceeding 2,000 twentieth-century works. Piero Portaluppi designed the Via Giorgio Jan building between 1929 and 1931 for engineer Gino Radici and Marieda's father Francesco Di Stefano; Antonio Boschi later donated the collection to Milan in 1974 and 1988, placing works by artists including Boccioni, Carrà, Sironi, Morandi, de Chirico, Fontana and Piero Manzoni into the civic patrimony. The progression moves from Tibaldi's centralized architecture for plague quarantine through Bossi's ceramic-clad residence on former transport ground and onward to Portaluppi's domestic setting for the Boschi Di Stefano collection, connecting public health, Liberty expansion and twentieth-century collecting across the districts surrounding Via Mauro Macchi.
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