Why you should experience Viale della Liberazione in Milan, Italy.
Viale della Liberazione is a striking corridor where Porta Nuova's metropolitan character meets Milan's vanished railway landscape, postwar business district and the reinvention of the Varesine as a new northern center.
Running through Porta Nuova between Piazza della Repubblica, and Via Melchiorre Gioia, the avenue crosses territory once occupied by elevated railway tracks before entering the high-rise district developed between the old city and Porta Garibaldi. Its unusually open profile preserves the dimensions of that former rail corridor, with contemporary towers rising behind older residential blocks along its southern edge. Movement along the avenue unfolds beneath tram wires and between sharply contrasting building generations, exposing the scale at which this section of Milan was repeatedly reconstructed. Glass towers and elevated pedestrian spaces introduce another register toward the west as the street enters the former Varesine grounds. The result is a corridor where railway infrastructure, postwar planning and twenty-first-century architecture occupy successive layers of one of Milan's most extensively reconstructed urban territories.
What you should know about Viale della Liberazione.
Viale della Liberazione is best known for occupying ground once crossed by the railway approaches to Milan's first Central Station, which opened in 1864 near present-day Piazza della Repubblica and reorganized the city's principal northern rail connections. The elevated tracks extended northwest across the future avenue toward lines serving Varese, Gallarate and Novara, dividing surrounding streets through embankments and underpasses. Opening the new Milano Centrale in 1931 removed the old terminus, yet its western tracks survived as the railway facility known as the Varesine. That terminal remained along the present Viale della Liberazione until the new Porta Garibaldi station entered service in 1963, withdrawing the railway front some 800 meters toward the northwest. Removal of the remaining tracks released the long embankment for construction of the avenue, converting a railway approach into an east-west road through the emerging Centro Direzionale. Milan's 1953 regulatory plan had already designated this northern sector for a concentrated business district intended to decentralize offices from the historic center. The realized portion developed principally between Via Melchiorre Gioia, Via Galvani, Via Fabio Filzi and the new Viale della Liberazione, making the avenue both the product of railway removal and one of the principal boundaries of Milan's postwar business center.
Architecture produced during that postwar campaign established a high-rise district immediately east of the former Varesine grounds. Melchiorre Bega completed Torre Galfa in 1959 at the junction of Via Galvani and Via Fara, giving the emerging business center a 31-storey vertical marker whose name combined those two streets. Bega then designed the STIPEL office building at Piazza Luigi Einaudi, constructed between 1960 and 1964 as telecommunications companies joined banks, insurers and public offices within the new district. Vittorio Gandolfi, Alberto Bazzoni, Luigi Fratino and Aldo Putelli developed the nearby municipal technical-services complex between 1955 and 1966, combining a taller volume with a bridging structure across the site. The INPS tower followed at Piazza Einaudi in 1967, extending the concentration of office buildings north of the avenue. These projects established the architectural scale of the Centro Direzionale decades before construction returned to the former railway ground west of Via Melchiorre Gioia, leaving Viale della Liberazione between two distinct generations of Milanese high-rise development.
How to fold Viale della Liberazione into your trip.
Viale della Liberazione works as the anchor to an exploration of Porta Nuova through nineteenth-century religious architecture, a surviving railway building adapted for cultural use and a civic institution dedicated to Milan's twentieth-century history.
Begin at Chiesa di San Gioachimo, constructed from 1880 to Enrico Terzaghi's design on ground immediately behind the old Central Station. Terzaghi developed the church around a centralized Greek-cross plan in a neo-Renaissance language, and Luigi Pastro enriched the interior with frescoes in 1927, placing a major religious commission within the district formed around Milan's expanding nineteenth-century railway system. Continue to Fondazione Riccardo Catella, housed in a late nineteenth-century railway warehouse that subsequently became a film set and contemporary-art workshop. Restoration in 2006 retained the historic structure and established the building as the foundation's headquarters, giving one surviving component of the area's railway inheritance a cultural role after the surrounding tracks and yards disappeared. Conclude at Casa della Memoria, inaugurated for the seventieth anniversary of the Liberation in 2015 and devoted to the Resistance, deportation, terrorism and political violence in republican Italy. The institution houses ANED, AIVITER, ANPI, Associazione Piazza Fontana 12 dicembre 1969 and Istituto Nazionale Ferruccio Parri, concentrating organizations devoted to distinct chapters of twentieth-century Italian history within a single civic institution. The progression moves from Terzaghi's church built beside the nineteenth-century railway through the reuse of a surviving rail warehouse and onward to an institution preserving the political history behind the avenue's own postwar name, connecting faith, industrial inheritance and civic memory across Porta Nuova.
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