Parco Sempione in Milan is now a must-see destination for those in the city center who want to spend a few hours in the green, away from urban traffic but within walking distance of the most important monuments of the Milanese parterre: the Castello Sforzesco, but also the Cenacolo and Santa Maria delle Grazie, the Pinacoteca di Brera and theArco della Pace… Whether it’s families with children, companies of friends ataperitif time, runners and sports enthusiasts or young couples intent on the first picnic of the season, Parco Sempione reserves a special corner for everyone, offering splendid views of the city and the architecture that dot the green area, from the walls of Castello Sforzesco to the much more modern Branca Tower, towering just a few meters from the Triennale headquarters.
However, not many people know that Sempione Park, now known as Milan‘s green lung, has remote origins and is the almost unrecognizable fragment of a history that begins very far away: that of the so-called Ducal Barcho of the Visconti-Sforza era, capable of bringing to life all the charm of the Milanese court between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
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Once upon a time, the Barcho–when Simplon Park was a hunting ground
Far beyond the extent of today’s Sempione Park, north of the Sforza Castle, the city of Milan already possessed “its” park at the end of the 14th century: it was the ducal-owned “Barcho,” created at the behest of Gian Galeazzo Visconti. During the 15th century, the large green area, used both as a hunting reserve and a cultivated garden, would be further increased at the behest of the new lords of Milan, the Sforzas. Girdled and equipped with as many as eight gates, beginning with the Porta Giova of the Castello Sforzesco, the park thus extended to an area of more than 3 million square meters, up to then totally rural locations such as Villa Pizzone or the Portello… a park so large that, if it still existed, it would truly be the city’s immense green lung!
The Barcho, reserved for the use and enjoyment of the dukes of Milan, was crisscrossed by lanes and streams, in a harmonious alternation of cultivated gardens, orchards and woods populated by game: hares, deer and stags, partridges and pheasants, perhaps even a few exotic animals… destined to set the tables of the Milanese court!
Hunting, moreover, was one of the favorite pastimes of Renaissance nobles, who spent leisurely moments riding along the paths of the park or lazing in the company of elegant ladies at the pavilions built in certain corners of the estate. At the time of Leonardo da Vinci, under the power of Ludovico il Moro, festivities and court ceremonies were celebrated as much in the castle as in the verdant spaces of the Barcho: in just a few steps, the duke could reach the hunting grounds by moving from the rooms of the Falconiera Tower of the Castello Sforzesco, through the Ponticella, past the moat, through the small castle garden and finally through the Ghirlandawalls… Perhaps this is why the famous Hall of the Axes, painted by Leonardo in the Castello Sforzesco, evokes the forms of a lush arboreal pavilion, not unlike the many that must have also graced the ducal Barcho during the warmer seasons.
The park project: a recent history
After the splendors of the Sforza era, the fate of the Barcho followed that of the Duchy of Milan: the hunting reserve was abandoned and Spanish fortifications were built on part of it, emblematic of that long period of foreign domination that Alessandro Manzoni knew how to narrate in the pages of I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed). At the end of the 19th century, with the intention of saving the Castello Sforzesco by restoring it as the seat of Milan’s civic museums, Cesare Beruto’s urban plan drew in the area north of the fortress the outline of the city park we know today: the Parco Sempione, designed by architect Emilio Alemagna. Uniting along a single visual axis the Castle symbol of Sforza’s Milan and the monuments of Napoleonic Milan – the Arena and the Arch of Peace – the “Simplon” revived in the natural taste of the English garden the distant memory of the ducal Barcho, of which, however, only a few traces can now be caught.
In addition to the ruined but fascinating remains of the Garland, the park hosts among its countless treasures monuments and architecture from a much more recent past: such is the case with the Art Nouveau building of theCivic Aquarium pavilion, the romantic Little Mermaid Bridge, the modern Branca Tower by Gio Ponti or the fountain of the Mysterious Baths, Giorgio De Chirico’s masterpiece hidden in the greenery of the city park, or the famous Milan Triennale… chapters of another history, closer to us but far from the times of the Barcho, suspended in the evanescent atmosphere of miniatures and courtly poems.
The trees of Sempione Park: a botanical heritage to be discovered
Today’s Sempione Park occupies only a tiny portion of the great ducal hunting estate that stretched north of Milan in the 15th century, but it is enough to evoke, in our eyes, at least the image of the immense green expanse that was to frame the Castello Sforzesco and the whole city.
Much has changed since then, and today’s best-known green area in the city, just a stone’s throw from the center of Milan, is the outcome of a complex urban evolution layered over the centuries: today the park deserves a guided tour not only to discover its history and monuments, but also the immense botanical heritage it gathers, among ponds and paths inspired by the style of English gardens. Flowers, shrubs, countless tall trees that, with their foliage, shade the park’s lawns even in the most torrid days: who knows which, among the plants present today, also grew in the Ducal Barcho? What is certain is that the botanical singularities of Parco Sempione include the rich ruderal flora growing on the walls of the Castello Sforzesco and on the surviving fragments of the Ghirlanda, vestiges of a past that never ceases to intrigue us!
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The treasures of Sempion Parke
