Why you should experience WOW Spazio Fumetto in Milan, Italy.
WOW Spazio Fumetto is a singular comics museum where Porta Vittoria's industrial inheritance, Milanese publishing culture, sequential art and popular imagination converged inside a former transport building transformed into the city's principal home for comics, illustration and animation.
Set along Viale Campania near Via Terenzio and just steps from Giardino Oreste del Buono, the museum occupied the surviving administrative building of an ATM tram depot created in 1926, expanded with its distinctive entrance arch in 1938 and acquired by Motta in 1960 before the surrounding industrial complex disappeared and its former footprint became a 12,500-square-meter public garden designed by Gilberto Oneto and Studio Conti Associati. The retained building gave comics an unusually appropriate physical setting, carrying a piece of Milan's transport and manufacturing history into a cultural institution devoted to another industry deeply associated with the city. Exhibition rooms moved between original drawings, comic books, animation, illustration and popular culture, repeatedly rebuilding the displays instead of imposing a fixed chronological collection. The result is a museum whose fourteen-year Milan chapter connected the city's enormous comics industry with the adaptive reuse of an industrial site, turning a surviving fragment of the old Campania depot into a public stage for the art form.
What you should know about WOW Spazio Fumetto.
WOW Spazio Fumetto is best known for becoming Milan's museum of comics, illustration and animated imagery after the Fondazione Franco Fossati opened the Viale Campania institution on April 1, 2011. Its inaugural exhibition, Editori coraggiosi, examined more than 200 publishers whose work had made Milan a consequential center of Italian comics across the preceding century, immediately positioning the museum around the city's publishing history instead of a single character or creator. The foundation itself grew from the legacy of Franco Fossati, the comics scholar, critic and collector whose death in 1996 prompted Furio Fossati, Luigi F. Bona and collaborators to preserve and extend his work; the present foundation was constituted in 2007 and gained legal recognition in Lombardy in 2009. Fossati left a collection exceeding 500,000 pieces, including comic books, original art and thousands of small cards carrying original drawings by creators from around the world, giving the organization an extraordinary body of primary comic culture from which to build exhibitions. WOW subsequently mounted more than 200 exhibitions in Milan and over 50 elsewhere, with subjects ranging from Topolino and television's Carosello to Belgian comics and collaborations with institutions including Brussels' Centre belge de la bande dessinée. More than one million people attended its exhibitions, events, educational activities and performances during the museum's Milan years. Fossati's immense collection, Milan's publishing history and a program capable of moving between Mickey Mouse, Belgian bandes dessinées, animation and Italian popular culture gave WOW a scope far larger than its 1,000-square-meter home suggested.
The name WOW carried its own history long before appearing above the museum entrance. Luigi F. Bona founded and directed WOW as an experimental comics publication during the mid-1970s, developing a group of collaborators known within the field as “quelli di WOW” and pursuing connections between comics, visual communication and popular literature that later fed directly into the Fondazione Franco Fossati. Four decades later the title returned as the name of the Milan museum, giving the institution a direct connection with the intellectual circle from which the foundation emerged. That Milan chapter ended on June 15, 2025 after the concession for the municipally owned Viale Campania building expired, closing fourteen years of exhibitions at the former depot. The foundation subsequently secured accommodation for its archive in Desio in April 2026, followed by confirmation in July that WOW would receive a new home in Monza through an investment exceeding €1 million to convert the former library on Via Zuccoli into a cultural center. A name born from a 1970s publication thus progressed through Fossati's scholarly legacy, a foundation, fourteen years of museum programming in Milan and a new institutional chapter in Brianza, preserving an unusually continuous lineage between comics criticism, collecting and public exhibition.
How to fold WOW Spazio Fumetto into your trip.
WOW Spazio Fumetto works as the anchor for an exploration connecting the industrial ground beneath its former museum, a surviving Liberty pavilion transformed by Dario Fo and Franca Rame and a Baroque burial complex whose successive lives culminated in another Milan museum.
Begin at Giardino Oreste del Buono, developed between 2005 and 2010 across 12,500 square meters formerly occupied by ATM and Motta, with Gilberto Oneto and Studio Conti Associati converting the industrial tract into two connected sections of public landscape. A 300-meter sculptural serpent crosses the park in reference to Milan's heraldic biscione, rising to three meters before terminating in two large heads, including a six-meter mosaic-covered structure; the garden received the name of writer, journalist and comics critic Oreste del Buono in 2015, placing another major figure in Italian popular culture directly beside WOW's former home. Continue to Palazzina Liberty Dario Fo e Franca Rame, where Alberto Migliorini designed a Liberty pavilion in 1908 for Milan's relocated fruit and vegetable market, using iron-framed windows and floral tile decoration for a building originally associated with merchant activity and later a café-restaurant. Demolition of the surrounding market in 1965 left Migliorini's pavilion standing, and between 1974 and 1980 Dario Fo and Franca Rame's La Comune converted it into a laboratory for participatory theater, an association Milan formalized by naming the building for the couple in 2017. Conclude at Rotonda della Besana, begun in 1695 as the Foppone dell'Ospedale Maggiore after the hospital's earlier burial ground became inadequate, with a central church and the extraordinary lobed cemetery portico developed through architects including Attilio Arrigoni, Francesco Croce and Francesco Raffagno. Water infiltration and growing burial demand drove expansion of the complex, which eventually received 150,000 burials before Austrian sanitary reforms ended its cemetery function; Napoleon's era produced an unrealized proposal by Luigi Cagnola to convert it into a pantheon, and later lives included barracks, hay storage, hospital use and municipal cultural space before the former church became home to MUBA. The progression moves from an ATM and Motta industrial tract becoming a garden named for a major comics critic through Migliorini's market pavilion becoming Fo and Rame's theatrical laboratory to a hospital cemetery evolving into a museum complex, revealing an eastern Milan repeatedly capable of giving obsolete infrastructure entirely new cultural lives.
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