Giardini Pubblici Indro Montanelli

Milan's first public park spreads across 172,000 square metres beside the old Spanish walls at Porta Venezia. Known simply as the Giardini Pubblici and renamed for the journalist Indro Montanelli in 2002, it layers eighteenth-century regular gardens, nineteenth-century romantic landscaping and late nineteenth-century avenues into the greenest pause in the city centre.

Why it matters

The gardens matter both as history and as daily Milanese life. Conceived under Austrian rule as the city's first public park, they preserve more than two centuries of garden design: Giuseppe Piermarini's original geometric layout, Giuseppe Balzaretto's mid-nineteenth-century romantic additions with ponds and curves, and Emilio Alemagna's tree-lined avenues dating to the 1881 reordering that followed the exhibitions the park then hosted. The park also frames the Natural History Museum, the Planetario Ulrico Hoepli and the PAC contemporary art pavilion.

What to notice

The park's two characters are visible between the older formal sections on the Palestro side and Balzaretto's romantic zone with winding paths, a pond, monumental trees and small temple-like garden structures. The perimeter on Corso Venezia passes directly in front of the Natural History Museum's terracotta-and-brick facade, while the western edge faces the PADiglione d'Arte Contemporanea. The gardens have also hosted the Orticola flower-market show, part of Milan's spring cultural calendar.

Context and history

The municipality's official page dates the park's three phases to 1794, 1862 and 1881, respectively the work of Giuseppe Piermarini, the architect of La Scala; Giuseppe Balzaretto; and Emilio Alemagna, with municipal restorations in 1958 and 2002. What began as an enlightened eighteenth-century project — the viceré Ferdinando d'Asburgo had the properties of the suppressed monasteries of San Dionigi and delle Carcanine turned into the first public garden — evolved, over the nineteenth century, into the romantic English-style park Milan knows today, and was finally dedicated to the journalist Indro Montanelli in 2002. Balzaretto's phase absorbed the seventeenth-century Palazzo Dugnani and even a small zoological park beside the Natural History Museum; later the publisher Ulrico Hoepli commissioned the planetarium that still rises inside the grounds. Its position along the Bastioni di Porta Venezia keeps the memory of the Spanish walls visible in the urban plan.