For the first time, with this guided walking tour, we will take you on a hunt for art, not the art kept in museums, but the art hidden in the streets of Milan, imprinted on its walls and doors, an art that knows no rules and that in Milan as well is able to astonish more and more.
Follow us on this unmissable tour of street art in the alleys of the Ticinese area, above and under the bridges on the Navigli, alongside age-old churches of Milan and in old courtyards we will discover real and unexpected works of art!
A guided tour for the very curious, to discover the original works by street artists.
Street Art: from a form of illegality to an art form
Until not very long ago, they were hastily dismissed and with a certain annoyance as “vandals”, the invasive and irreverent (and illegal) creators of communication proper to the world of young people, clearly contesting the “system”. They were mostly incomprehensible messages and for this reason they were labelled as forms of social deterioration to be condemned, Those words and those drawings were then rehabilitated, also thanks to an exhibition which has gone down in history and which in 2007, legitimized by the art critic Vittorio Sgarbi, meant that they were considered as a new form of art, an expression of healthy avant-garde young activity. Then there was the exhibition on Banksy, in the public MUDEC museum, which dislodged many clichés: not always and not only Street Art as aggressive communication and not always and not only Street Art as communication void of content. But an art that allows reflections on the contemporary age to be glimpsed, with the communicative immediacy of comprehensible (and, or appreciable) images in the street and therefore… by anyone. In this change of vision, it was discovered that the streets, the bridges and the gardens of Milan have a voice and that now, cleared increasingly often by the courts, these multi-shaped voices can, on the contrary, be an important resource against urban decay (as in the case of the “Muri Liberi” project of the Council), a real antidote to the ugliness of many anonymous places in the city and against social deterioration, to communicate with young people who in those works recognize themselves and reclaim their city.
The Street Art of Navigli, a bridge between history and young Milanese
This is how the murals with a historical theme in San Lorenzo came about: they are bridge between the Milan of yesterday and that of today’s nightlife for the young who today gather around its Columns This is how the protests painted on the walls of the social centres such as Conchetta or that of Via Gola come into being. This is how the often ironic murals which have colonized the bridges and the houses on the Navigli, where even Kandinski is quoted, have come to life. Images, but also messages that the “street poet,” Ivan, has scattered through the city, like those in dialogue with the church of San Calimero or as in the gigantic images in Piazza Cardina Ferrari which portray Alda Merini, Jannacci , Gaber and Fo and that more recent Milan which has to be remembered.
They are all projects of artistic “invasions” which private buyers are now looking for, as shown by the Street of Irony, which livens up one of the oldest streets in Milan with images, poetic messages and even riddles.
A guided tour in the area of Navigli and Porta Ticinese to discover the Street Art and appreciate this face, more and more emerging, of Milan!
Itinerary led by the architect Monica Torri
