Staying in Bicocca

Until the 1980s this was factory land. Pirelli made tyres across an area the size of a neighbourhood, and when it closed it left a hole that Milan took twenty years to fill. The result is the most interesting place in the city for understanding how a piece of urban fabric gets rebuilt from nothing.

Today that space holds a university with thirty thousand students, a two-thousand-seat opera house and an industrial shed turned into one of the largest contemporary art spaces in Europe. Around it, the residential neighbourhood that was always there.

What is within walking distance

University of Milano-Bicocca — the campus is open, you walk through it, and its squares are effectively the neighbourhood's public space. Libraries, canteens and cafés that anyone can use.

Teatro degli Arcimboldi — built to host La Scala during its restoration and kept afterwards as Milan's second great hall. Opera, concerts, dance, theatre.

Pirelli HangarBicocca — a former locomotive factory turned exhibition space. Inside stand Anselm Kiefer's Seven Heavenly Palaces, twenty-metre concrete towers, installed permanently. Admission is free. It is one of the most striking places in the city and almost no tourist knows about it.

Collina dei Ciliegi — an artificial planted hill that flowers all at once in April. The neighbourhood park.

Getting around

The M5 lilac line is the neighbourhood's metro: automatic, frequent, driverless. Southbound it reaches Isola, Garibaldi and San Siro; for the Duomo you change once.

The Passante railway stops at Greco Pirelli, a few stops from Central Station and with direct trains towards Monza and Brianza — useful if you are in Milan for work but also need to move outside the city.

The trams and trolleybuses along viale Sarca cover what the metro does not, and night replacement lines run after the metro closes.

Who it suits

Students. The campus is on foot, and an apartment here costs a fraction of a studio near Porta Romana.

People working in northern Milan. Pirelli, Deutsche Bank, Siemens and much of the service sector sit on the northern axis, not in the centre.

Anyone staying longer than a week. This is where the local markets, greengrocers and launderettes are: the things you need when a trip stops being a holiday and becomes a period of living somewhere.

Trade fair visitors. It sounds counterintuitive because Rho is on the other side, but the M5 feeds into the M1 and the journey is direct, without crossing the crowded centre.

Eating, without looking too hard

The neighbourhood is not a food destination and does not claim to be. What it does have is what people sleeping here actually need: bakeries that open at six, pizza by the slice to take away, trattorias with a student lunch menu, a couple of good Sicilian places, supermarkets open late. For a proper evening out, the centre is twenty minutes away.

Our apartments here

We have seven of them across via Mario Fubini, via Luigi Pulci and via Savoldo, all within a ten-minute walk of the campus and the metro. They are genuine one-bedroom flats with a full kitchen, washing machine and Wi-Fi, built for stays from a few nights to a few months.

→ See the apartments in Bicocca

And if you want to see how Bicocca fits into the rest of the city, start from the Milan neighbourhood guide.