Roberto Monelli, the 1957 born architect, journalist, publicist and copywriter tells it in his latest book “Tortona Solari. Milan in un quartiere”, published by Mursia. The work, created in collaboration with the Museolab6 association, was recently presented at the BASE cultural center. We can speak of a real guide, designed to create attention and curiosity in the reader for an area that has undergone numerous changes, perhaps among the most interesting and incisive of those that Milan has experienced from over a century ago to today. Individual episodes that create a map: the author moves through areas, streets, from house number to house number with the care and interest of a historian, the precision of a topographer/cartographer, even of a detective. Data, facts, anecdotes abound, some well known, others almost unknown to most, but no less engaging or less thoroughly investigated.

"In the beginning there were fields, farmhouses and two paths", says the author. Then, in 1870, with the inauguration of the Porta Genova railway station - the oldest still active in Milan - and of the line that connects the capital city to Mortara, everything changed. The surroundings of Via Tortona and Via Solari first became a village and then a city, or rather an integral part of post-unification Milan, the second city of the newborn kingdom with its 300,000 inhabitants – at the time second only to Naples - which was already the economic capital of the new state, thanks to its geographical location and the good infrastructures inherited from the long Austrian domination. From totally agricultural, the neighborhood soon and quickly becomes industrial. It retains the primacy of production site par excellence, competing for concentration of companies with few others, for at least one hundred years. The major Italian and international companies establish their headquarters here, alongside craft workshops and workers' homes. We are talking about Ansaldo, Osram, CGE, Bisleri, Richard-Ginori, Bugatti, Isotta Fraschini and many other excellent brands. But the area has known since some decades a "third life", renowned and appreciated far beyond the borders of Milan and Italy. About a hundred years after the first boom, a second one comes quickly. The industrial supremacy of the area is depleted, the buildings are obsolete or unsuitable for the new productive reality that replaces the nineteenth or early twentieth century one, their dimensions are inadequate, the delocalization was starting. The 70s and the very first 80s of the last century are times of decline and abandonment. Both of them were Immediately resolved: the empty spaces soon become grounds for conquest and enhancement thanks to fashion, which in part and  for various reasons, i leaves the so-called Quadrilatero right in the center. The "old" spaces are optimal: they are large, functional, not excessively expensive. "only" a slightly incisive dusting off is to adapt them to the new purposes. Photography studios, halls for fashion shows, showrooms, multi-tasking spaces for events of various kinds open up. And, almost simultaneously, art and above all design arrive together with fashion, so much so that exactly this area becomes the beating heart of the Fuorisalone, one of the most significant expressions of the new identity of Milan, post-industrial, more creative than ever, always able to get up quickly.  The author explains it: "The Tortona Solari district has transformed its industrial past into a paradigm of contemporary urban identity". Milan in a neighborhood indeed.

The "heart of the heart" of the district? Superstudio Più, according to Monelli, with its godmother Gisella Borioli - godmother in fact both of the Fuorisalone, thanks to the Superdesign Show, and of the new district identity - who already arrived here in 1983, forty years ago, taking over the CGE area. Not even Gisella Borioli skimps on anecdotes "We did the first Vivien Westwood’s fashion show in the midst of the machines of the CGE, the workers were still there and we didn't send them away... Immediately afterwards we opened the doors to the public and to designers like Jasper Morrison, Philippe Starck and the Bourollec brothers… And the 2001 edition of the event, just the second, has already 13,000 visitors.”  

Robert Monelli,
"Tortona Solari. Milan in a neighborhood”
Mursia Editore, 2023.