Milan: Medieval City to Metropolitana City

As with many other modern cities, the history of Milan, the economic capital of Italy, is tightly tied with the development of its far-reaching and increasingly sophisticated rail networks. And as in many early rail developments, Milan’s networks started with the construction of separate terminals for short, isolated lines and no clear network vision.

With kilometres of track incessantly laid down and torn up, coping with the need to move people and goods quickly around a growing city and region, in many ways Milan parallels London’s experience – a medieval city, initial railways outside the city gates, a widespread tram network, pioneering metro construction techniques, and cross-city express tunnels, among others.

But in other ways, Milan’s urban and transit history is profoundly different. When London started to build its vast rail network in the 1830s, it was already the largest and most rapidly growing metropolis on earth, with some 1.6 million inhabitants, the capital of a large Empire, and an industrial powerhouse. When Milan opened its first railway in the 1840s, it had barely 200,000 inhabitants, only slightly more than in the mid-sixteenth century, in an area of 8.5 km² (three square miles). It was the provincial capital of a peripheral Austrian province, periodically shaken by the turbulent period of revolutions and wars that soon brought Italian unification in 1861.

When its rail age began, Milan already had a strong manufacturing tradition, and was surrounded by a prosperous agricultural hinterland of well-established towns and cities. Its population growth was split between a strong dense core of multistory apartment blocks and a nearby suburbanisation centred on a cluster of cities. This dense network of towns and cities is one legacy of an early prosperity and the high levels of urbanisation that characterise the Italian peninsula during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. For that reason, Milan had developed a dense interurban tramway system to connect the city with those growing pre-existing urban settlements, in a network complementing the mainline rail one. London, wealthier and surrounded by large domains, grew outward in a tentacular manner to low-density terraced house suburbs, pushed by the Underground and train. However, Milan never experienced the density and rapidity of rail construction that characterised the British capital since the 1840s rail mania.

These four maps demonstrate Milan’s growth into its hinterland, largely attracted to the Alpine Piedmont region to the north.

Milan is now the centre of a large metropolitan area inhabited by some five million people, attempting to tackle its mobility problems with an ever-expanding network of urban and regional rail, while leveraging its extensive and iconic legacy tramway network. But let’s start from the beginning.

The beginning: HERe a station, there a station

On August 17^th, 1840, when Milan was still part of the Italian provinces of the Austrian Empire, the first rail line in northern Italy, a 15 km line connecting Milan to Monza, opened to the public. Officially named Imperial-Regia Privilegiata Strada Ferrata da Milano a Monza, the line terminated just outside Milan’s Porta Nuova gate along the Spanish Walls (Bastioni Spagnoli), built by the Spanish rulers of Milan in the mid 16^th century and still marking the city boundaries at the time. In 1846, a second station was opened outside Porta Tosa gate as the western terminal of the first stretch of the Imperial Regia Privilegiata Strada Ferrata Ferdinandea Lombardo-Veneta Milano-Venezia – also called the Milan-Venice rail line. In following years, new lines were built radiating from the city, despite the stop and go following the political turmoil of ‘Milan’s Five-Days Revolt’ in 1848 and the First War of Independence of 1848-49 opposing Piedmont, who briefly occupied the city, and the Austrian Empire.

The first Stazione centrale

Nevertheless, the military needs and the early industrial expansion of the city and its hinterland pushed for a quick development of an initial rail network connecting the city to other cities in all directions. In 1851, after only few years in service, the Porta Nuova station was rebuilt to accommodate both the Milan-Monza and the Milan-Como rail terminals. The continuous development of new lines continued with railways to Venice, Turin, Bologna, and Genoa. This prompted a rationalisation of the Milan’s rail terminals, with the construction of a new, large, modern Stazione Centrale (central station) situated just outside the northern city walls, 400m east of Porta Nuova, to be shared by the major private railway concessionaires. The foundation stone was laid in September 1857.

In 1859, the line from Turin, then capital of the Kingdom of Piedmont, reached Porta Nuova as its temporary terminus. Only a few months later, during the Second War of Independence and while Stazione Centrale was still under construction, the two existing terminals, Porta Nuova and Porta Tosa, were temporarily connected by the French and Piedmontese armies. They laid track shortly after they occupied the city to allow trains charged with troops coming from Piedmont to continue to the east toward Venice and the lower Po Valley, where the Austrians were retrenched. For the first time, all the lines converging to Milan were connected in a single network, even if temporarily.

The annexation of Lombardy and most of northern Italy to Piedmont as a result of the war increased the impetus for the creation of a seamless rail network centred on Milan. This also accelerated the construction of the Stazione Centrale and of the most controversial part of the plan: a long brick viaduct cutting through the Lazzaretto. Completed at the beginning of the 16^th century, the Lazzaretto was a large squared open space (370 square metres) with an octagonal chapel in the centre, surrounded by an arched portico lined with 288 small chambers used to isolate and treat plague-carriers during the cyclical eruptions. As plagues became less common, it was progressively abandoned in the 18^th century, but it remained a cherished monument for many Milanese – to the point that some important scenes of what is probably the most famous Italian novel of the 19^th century, The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni, take place in the Lazzaretto during the plague of 1630.

Despite the opposition of many intellectuals and local notables, the viaduct was finally built and the new Stazione Centrale, with its Second Empire architectural touch, was opened in 1864 by Vittorio Emanuele II, first King of Italy, as the unified terminus of the growing network of lines connecting the city to the rest of the newborn country.

The railway belt becomes too tight

In the following years, Milan kept growing and so did its rail network. In 1870, the line from Genoa was inaugurated, terminating in a new station in the south near Porta Ticinese. Three years later, the line was extended along the western limits of the city, to connect with the other lines at Stazione Centrale and to reach the newly built dedicated freight yard at Garibaldi, testifying to the growing importance of Milan as the manufacturing hub of the north. This finally connected the city directly with the new country’s most important seaport.

By the end of the decade, a new central rail terminal, erected not far from the Sforzesco Castle, was opened for the new rail lines leading north to Erba and Saronno. It was built by the Società Anonima Ferrovie Milano-Saronno e Milano-Erba, later renamed Società Anonima per le Ferrovie Nord Milano (FNM), one of several private concessionaires with Belgian and French capital that spurred the development of local rail networks around Milan, Rome, and Naples in the decades between 1870 and 1920. The FNM network kept growing in the following decades as a complementary system connecting Milan with the quickly industrialising and densely populated Big Lakes region bordering Switzerland to the north-west. It was mainly intended as a bypass route for freight traffic serving new yards situated on the south and west, avoiding the already overcrowded Stazione Centrale. The great depression of the 1880s slowed down the growth of the rail network for more than a decade, but the southern part of the ring was finally completed in 1904, right on the eve of the 1905 Italian railways nationalisation.

The complete ring did not last long, unfortunately. Even before being completed, the rail ring was poised for a short life in a fast-growing city. The Belle Époque, also known as the Liberal era, was characterised by the progressive democratisation of political life, an overall modernisation of the country, and what some economists consider the first Italian economic miracle, concentrated in the ‘Industrial Triangle’ of Milan, Turin, and Genoa. As Milan was growing quickly both in population and in size, this second rail ring was a wall already too tight for a city that had demolished the Spanish walls just two decades earlier to make room for the intensive construction of homes and factories. By the 1890s, local politicians, landowners, and economic interests had already started to lobby the government for a large scale restructuring of the rail network around Milan, pushing it further out and freeing up space in the city.

The great railway reorganisation

Studies for an overall reorganisation of the rail layout around Milan had already started in 1889 by the Ministry of Public Works. But the project only gained momentum after the 1905 nationalisation of the major private railway concessionaires creating the Ferrovie dello Stato (FS) rail network which united all of Italy’s intercity railways. The crucial injection of public funding for rail modernization during the 1900s also created the new Direttissime fast lines between Bologna-Florence and Rome-Naples, and kick-started a systematic electrification of the FS network. The approved scheme envisioned a new larger Milan Stazione Centrale some 800 metres north of the existing one, the displacement of the eastern and northern rail ring further out, and the decommissioning of the western freight yard and by-pass line. The latter was hindering the development of the mainly upper-class neighbourhoods around Sempione Parc and at Conciliazione. That scheme also provided modern freight yards and a large marshalling yard along the line to Venice, as freight traffic increased much more than expected in the booming economy of the Belle Epoque.

AND BIRTH OF THE MODERN Stazione CENTRALE

The entire reorganisation of the Milan railway hub took two decades to come into fruition. Part of the new northern ring was opened right before the onset of the WWI and the eastern one was partially opened in 1918. But the deep economic and political crisis that ensued in the early 1920s delayed the commissioning of the new Milano Stazione Centrale until 1931. Built in a mixture of Art Deco and neo-Assyrian monumental style, the station layout was inspired by contemporary German stations, notably Leipzig and Stuttgart, and by Washington DC’s Union Station. For the impressive colossal size and the pompousness of the façades, the vaulted marble covered carriage gallery and departing halls, and the impressive four steel arched roofs, the largest being 34m high and spanning 72m, the station was dubbed by its own designer, the architect Ulisse Stacchini, as the ‘Cathedral of Movement’.

The old Stazione Centrale and the former rail ring were demolished in the following years and replaced by what is today Piazza della Repubblica and a long, wide boulevard. A smaller station was built a few hundred metres west of the demolished one, mainly as the terminus of electric trains heading to Varese, nicknamed ‘Varesine’ station, that has survived to today. After the demolition of the first ring, it took more than 70 years to see trains coming back along this central axis, although in a very different way.

urban and interurban tramways

The story of rail transport in Milan would be incomplete without describing the parallel implementation of the urban and interurban rail network that started in the 1870s. Milan had a horse-drawn omnibus urban service since 1861, operated by the Società Anonimadegli Omnibus (SAO). But the first rail-based transit was developed outside the city boundaries, as the city initially resisted the installation of rails in its own streets.

The first interurban tramway line was opened in 1876 to connect Milan with Monza. A second line to Saronno was opened in 1877. After the initial resistance of the city’s authorities against the extension of the tracks within the city boundaries was softened by the immediate public success pf the new interurban lines, both lines were finally extended to more central termini in 1878. In the following years, the introduction of steam traction and the extreme popularity of the service sparked an interurban boom, marked by the opening of several new lines to Vaprio (1878), Sedriano (1879), Vimercate, Pavia, and Lodi (1880), Giussano (1881) and many more in the following years, creating a vast network radiating from the city to the densely populated outskirts. The steam traction continued to be used on interurban tramways until the first half of the 20^th century and the little steam locomotives were friendly nicknamed gamba de legn (wooden leg in the Milanese dialect), because of their lame pace. The network grew fast in the following decades until reaching its peak extension in the 1930s, covering several hundred kilometres in all directions.

The extension of the interurban network into the city opened the way for a horse-drawn tramway service within the city boundaries in 1881, initially exploited by the same SAO company that managed the horse drawn omnibus service. The network grew slowly in the following years, until in 1892 the Edison electric utility company proposed the full electrification of the fleet. After a short experimentation with a demonstration electric line, the whole tramway network was acquired by Edison and fully electrified by 1901. In the years before the Great War, the network kept growing, extending further out as the city continued to expand outside the old limits, especially after the annexation of the neighbouring jurisdictions, the Corpi Santi.

As the tramway gained popularity as the new form of transportation for the masses and the system grew to reach every corner of the city, many new uses were experimented with. When the new municipal Cemetery, the Cimitero Maggiore, opened in 1895, a special tramways connection with a dedicated station was built to allow for the transportation of corpses from private houses and hospitals, and special cars were imported during the 1910s to be used for street cleaning and deliveries. Amid the difficulties of wartime, with retirees and women hired to replace the drafted drivers, the system was finally municipalised in 1917. Under municipal control, the system introduced several innovations, like remotely controlled switches and new articulated rolling stock using pantographs instead of trolley poles.

At the end of the 1920s, the iconic ‘series 1500 – type 1928’ bogies streetcars were finally introduced, since nicknamed Le Ventotto, based on the design of the Peter Witt streetcars built in Cleveland a decade before. Manufactured by the hundreds, these wooden cars painted with the original yellow and cream livery, are still operate today on many low traffic lines along the city streets – they are an integral part of Milan’s cityscape.

The slow decline of the tramways network started in the 1920s, with the 1926 reorganisation expelling the tramway ‘carousel’ from Piazza Duomo, where many lines had terminated. Despite losing ground in the city centre, the tramway network kept growing in the periphery, mostly in reserved rights-of-way along wide tree-lined boulevards. By the 1930s, both the urban and interurban networks reached their maximum extent. The advent of the automobile and the concurrence of rubber-tired transit, both diesel buses and trolleybuses, as well as the onset of World War II blocked any further system expansion.

The long path to the Ferrovia Metropolitana

Since the last decade of the 19^th century, Milan grew increasingly congested with the acceleration of the population growth in the rapidly industrialising periphery. The growing success of metro networks opening elsewhere in Europe prompted a wave of proposals to bring subterranean rail transit to Milan. The first plan for an urban underground rail network had already been suggested in the 1880s, as a horse powered ippovia using the bed of the dried Navigli canals.

But it was only from the beginning of the 20th century that plans for the construction of a ferrovia metropolitana (metropolitan railway) started to become more serious, especially in the wake of the 1906 Railway Exposition in Milan which celebrated the opening of the Simplon tunnel as the most direct connection to Paris. The wonder of this Exposition was an elevated rail line connecting the two sites of the fair, modelled after the elevated section of line 2 of the freshly inaugurated Paris Métro.

In 1912, under pressure from a growing number of proposals submitted from renowned engineers and venture companies, Milan finally set up a commission and proper funding to evaluate the feasibility of a metro network for the city. Among the several schemes examined by the commission, that of Carlo Broggi was the most accomplished and detailed, with three radial lines crossing at Piazza Duomo and a circular line along the former city walls, with narrow Parisian-style trainsets and shallow subsurface stations. After the interruption of the Great War, a frenzy of new proposals continued in the 1920s, with several projects presented by private companies or elaborated by the technical office of the municipality. Finally, in the 1930s, in conjunction with the competition for the city masterplan, an official project was created by Marco Semenza and submitted to the Ministry of Public Works in 1933, while an alternate one was produced by the city’s technical office. Despite diverging approaches of concentrating on serving the city and connecting the rail terminals, versus a wider regional approach focused on a far reaching network, a consensus started to build around the alignment of the first line. This project was presented in 1942, a few months before the first Allied bombs started to fall on the city.

The war interrupted the city’s pace of rail development, but it picked up again after, as will we in Part 2.

This guest post is from Marco Chitti, PhD candidate in Urban Planning at l’Université de Montréal.

Uncredited photos, and those by Giorgio Stagni, drawings and articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.