The Bicocca District, between industrial past and redevelopment

The history of the Bicocca

Once upon a time… the Bicocca! The name of the neighborhood derives from the presence of the Bicocca degli Arcimboldi, a small suburban castle belonging to the Arcimboldi family and used during the 15th century as a country residence. In fact, you have to imagine that at that time this area of the suburbs north of the center of Milan was occupied by cultivated land and woods, an ideal place for fighting and battles between the armies that faced each other, over the centuries, for the domination of the Milanese territory. It was here, in 1522, that the Battle of the Bicocca was fought: the defeat inflicted on the French by the Spanish army was so resounding that even today to indicate a defeat there is the French saying “C’est une bicoque“! Four centuries later, the Arcimboldi coat of arms was visible among the factories that occupied the entire industrial district of the Bicocca area, which in the meantime had become an integral part of the City of Milan as a result of the city’s gradual building expansion. With the industrial crisis of the 1970s, many industries began relocating their factories between Greco and Sesto San Giovanni: Pirelli, Ansaldo, Breda, Falck… A new season had begun for the history of the district, by then heavily deindustrialized. The Bicocca Project and Pirelli’s industrial area reconversion plan, in the mid-1980s, had the power to give this area back to the city and really breathe life into it, under a new functional and architectural guise.

The redevelopment of the Bicocca neighborhood

So finally what was once an area of disused factories and concrete carcasses is now a new territory, bordered by a few landmark buildings: such as the University of Milano-Bicocca, reached by thousands of students a day, the Arcimboldi Theater, which from being a mere substitute for the more famous Teatro alla Scala, now stands out in the Milanese cultural scene; theHangar Bicocca, a venue for temporary exhibitions devoted to contemporary art and enriched by the permanent display of Anselm Kiefer’s Seven Heavenly Palaces; the futuristic Pirelli Headquarters, the heart of the new district as well as of the old Pirelli plant. An authentic Integrated Multifunctional Technological Pole, an incubator of new production activities thanks to corporate entities such as Siemens, Deutsche Bank and Reuters.
An avant-garde project that architect Vittorio Gregotti, creator of almost all the new buildings, liked to define as “a civil, simple architecture, without the search for applause.”
If you want to admire the changing Milan, in its continuous historical, social and urbanistic transformation, a guided tour of the Bicocca district is certainly not to be missed!