Porta Nuova

What it is

Porta Nuova is a business district on the northern rim of central Milan, and the name holds two places at once. The older is the Neoclassical gate of 1810, designed by Giuseppe Zanoia, that stands where the Spanish walls once crossed the road north; the district takes its name from it. The newer is the quarter of towers, decks and gardens built behind the gate on ground that had been railway land and industrial waste for decades. That project was conceived in 1997 with the American developer Gerald D. Hines and his partners, was definitively approved in 2005, and covers 290,000 square metres, later increased to 346,500. Three practices masterplanned it in three parts: Pelli Clarke Pelli took the Garibaldi area beside the station, Kohn Pedersen Fox the Varesine area, named after a demolished terminus that once sent trains to Varese, and Boeri Studio the Isola area. Its landmark is the UniCredit Tower, a 31-storey asymmetrical building that reaches 231 metres including an 80-metre stainless steel spire and is the tallest in Italy. Ownership sits abroad: Qatar Holding bought a 40 per cent stake in 2013 and the remaining 60 per cent in 2015. A visitor is walking through a working office quarter, not a monument.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What's inside

The centre of the district is Piazza Gae Aulenti, a circular square about 80 metres across with a surface of 2,300 square metres, raised ten metres above street level over three intermediate floors of metro station, car park and retail. Cesar Pelli designed it and it was inaugurated on 8 December 2012, named for the architect and designer Gae Aulenti. It is paved in slate and ringed by two levels of iron, wood and glass canopies carrying solar panels that feed the three towers beside it. Three circular infinity fountains sit in the paving, and a continuous curved bench of stone grit runs 105 metres around them. At the foot of the UniCredit Tower stands Alberto Garutti's Egg, twenty-three chromed brass tubes that link the levels of the square vertically and are the artist's first permanent urban installation in Milan. After dark the fountains are lit in colour and the LED Solar Tree draws on the daylight it stored. Beyond the square the district runs on: the Torre Diamante between viale della Liberazione and via Galilei, the two planted residential towers of the Bosco Verticale in the Isola streets, and the long green wedge of BAM, the Library of Trees, between the square and Isola.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

How long to spend

Ninety minutes is the figure this guide records for Porta Nuova, and it is an editorial judgement: neither the city's visitor pages nor any operator publishes a visit length for a district that is a set of public streets. Ninety minutes buys the honest circuit. Come up from the metro into Piazza Gae Aulenti, walk the full ring of the bench, look down the three fountains and up the spire, spend a few minutes on the Egg where the chrome takes the whole square in reflection, then leave the deck on the north side and drop into BAM. The park is where the pace changes; twenty minutes of lawn and gravel path gets a visitor under the Bosco Verticale, which is the picture most people came for. Add the walk out through Isola's older streets or south along Corso Como and the time is gone. Cut it to forty minutes for the square and the towers alone. Stretch it to half a day only if a meal, a shop or an exhibition is part of the plan, because the sights themselves do not need longer. There is nothing here to queue for, which is the main reason the figure stays small.

Checked 2026-08-26

Season and crowds

The district reads differently by hour more than by season, and nothing here closes, so timing is about company and light. On a weekday morning it is a commuter place: coffee queues, lanyards, deliveries crossing the deck. Around one o'clock the offices empty into BAM, which is when the park looks the way it was designed to look — the city guide notes that locals treat it as a lunch spot in summer — and when the square is busiest. Mid-afternoon on a weekday is the quietest hour and the easiest for walking the whole circuit without weaving. Weekends invert it: the offices are shut, the crowd is families, tourists and shoppers, and Corso Como to the south fills towards evening. The best hour for most visitors is the last one before dark, when the low sun works along the glass and the fountains and the Solar Tree light up as the sky goes. Winter is not a bad time here; the paving is hard and dry, the wind is the only real complaint, and the towers look better against a grey sky than most buildings do. Avoid heavy rain, which turns the slate deck slippery and leaves nowhere sheltered to stand.

Checked 2026-08-26

Tickets

There is nothing to buy. The city's visitor page for Piazza Gae Aulenti records admission as free, and the rest of the district is ordinary public street, deck and park with no gate and no ticket office. Nobody checks anything on the way in, there is no timed entry, and no pass is needed. The two exclusions are worth knowing before setting out. The Bosco Verticale towers are private residences and the same official pages state plainly that they are not open to the public, so there is no lobby visit, no terrace and no way to see the planting from inside — the towers are looked at from the ground. The office towers around the square, the UniCredit Tower included, are workplaces rather than viewpoints, and this guide records no public observation deck for them. One honest gap: no opening hours are published for the district or for the square by the city's own visitor pages, which do print opening times for the ticketed and gated places they list. This guide therefore records no hours for Porta Nuova rather than inventing a pair of times. Individual shops, cafes and exhibition spaces inside the district keep their own hours and should be checked with them.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Getting there

No car is needed and a car is a nuisance. The city's page for Piazza Gae Aulenti lists the approaches: the mainline station Milano Porta Garibaldi, the green M2 line at Garibaldi and the lilac M5 line at Garibaldi. The metro exits inside the structure of the square itself, so a visitor arrives underneath and rides up. For the northern half of the district the same site gives M2 at Gioia and M5 at Isola, both of which land closer to the Bosco Verticale and to BAM than Garibaldi does. Porta Garibaldi is a regional and suburban hub, which makes Porta Nuova one of the easiest places in Milan to reach from the airports and from out of town. On foot it is about twenty minutes north from the Duomo, or ten from Brera through Corso Garibaldi. Drivers should read the city's own getting-around page first: Milan operates Area B and Area C restricted zones with charges and vehicle bans, and more polluting cars are limited to weekends and holidays. Parking exists under the square but there is no reason to use it. Cycling in is realistic — the ground is flat and the district is laced with bike paths.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What to watch out for

The first thing to understand is that the square is ten metres up. Visitors who navigate to the address at street level end up circling a wall of retail frontage looking for a way in; take the escalators from the metro concourse or the steps from Corso Como and the deck opens out. The second is that the Bosco Verticale is somebody's home. There is no visitor entrance, the courtyards are private, and residents are used to strangers photographing their balconies — keep to the public pavements and the park, and do not point a long lens into windows. The third is wind. A raised open deck between tall glass towers funnels it, and the square can be markedly colder and gustier than the street below, so bring a layer that would seem excessive elsewhere in the city. Beyond that: this is an office district, so the food and coffee around the square is priced for expense accounts and thins out badly at weekends, when Isola one street north is better value. The district is still building, so hoardings move and a route that worked last year may be fenced. And the slate paving is slick in rain.

Checked 2026-08-26

Photography

Porta Nuova is unusually generous to a camera because it was designed as a set of surfaces that reflect. The chrome tubes of Garutti's Egg hold the whole square in a distorted band and are the one obvious shot; get low and the towers wrap around the metal. The infinity fountains give a clean mirror when the water is still, and the curved bench makes a long leading line towards the UniCredit spire, which is hard to fit into a frame from close up — step back to the north edge of the deck for the whole tower. The classic Bosco Verticale picture is taken from the lawns of BAM or from via Gaetano De Castillia, looking up through foreground planting so that the trees on the balconies read as trees rather than as green smudges; late spring and early autumn give the fullest foliage. Light: the glass faces east and south, so early morning is the cleanest, while the last hour before sunset puts warm light on the towers and the blue hour catches the lit fountains and the Solar Tree. A wide lens is the useful one. Tripods draw attention on the deck, which is privately managed public space, so work handheld if possible.

Checked 2026-08-26

Where it is

Nearby

External links

• View on Wikidata