As 2024 draws to a close, the transformation of Milan’s Scalo Porta Romana is in full swing. Across from the celebrated Fondazione Prada, designed by Rem Koolhaas’ OMA, the skyline bristles with cranes. These mark the construction of the Olympic Village by SOM – Skidmore, Owings & Merrill – a project poised to host athletes for the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Games. Soon, this long-neglected expanse of tracks, a historic barrier between the city center and its southern suburbs, will give way to a new district.

At last. Because for over half a century, Porta Romana and other railway hubs in Milan have inspired countless visions, blueprints, and grand proposals – most of which never left the drawing board. The Scalo has been an unsolvable puzzle for policymakers, a siren call for architects eager to leave their mark, and a recurring obsession for academics at Milan’s Faculty of Architecture. It stands as one of the most emblematic points in the “Milan that never was.”

The Milan that never was is often a megalomaniacal Milan. One of the earliest and most striking unrealized visions was Giuseppe Antonio Antolini’s proposal for Foro Bonaparte in 1801. Tasked with reshaping Milan into the capital of Napoleon’s Italian Republic, the Bolognese architect imagined a vast, circular plaza, 600 meters in diameter, centered on the Castello Sforzesco, which was to be transformed into a majestic neoclassical monument.

Antolini’s design envisioned the city’s Napoleonic institutions encircling the plaza, bordered by a ring canal connected to the Navigli and lined with continuous porticoes. The scale of the proposed forum dwarfed the ancient city’s modest blocks, contrasting starkly with their irregular medieval layout. Though Napoleon ultimately opted for more restrained projects, such as Luigi Canonica’s Arena Civica (1806-1807) and Arco della Pace (1807-1838), the spirit of Antolini’s vision lingers in the curving streets of today’s Foro Bonaparte framing the castle.

Scattered across Milan, fragments of its unbuilt history remain visible to the keen observer. An interesting exercise is to seek out the remnants of two ambitious, yet incomplete, mid-20th-century urban arteries. These streets were intended to cut triumphantly through neighborhoods and blocks, but for various reasons, they were abandoned mid-project.

The first, dubbed “diabolica racchetta” (diabolic “racket”) – a high-speed traffic corridor outlined in the 1934 Albertini Plan – was designed to cut through the working-class neighborhoods south of the Duomo. A fragment of this axis still exists today, connecting Corso di Porta Vittoria to Piazza Missori via a series of streets: Verzieri, Larga, and Albricci. However, it abruptly ends at the ruins of the Church of San Giovanni in Conca, swallowed up by the chaotic urban layout of Piazza Missori.

The second, the direttissima or urban highway, was laid out in the 1953 Master Plan to connect Via Pagano to Piazzale Lagosta. Quickly abandoned, only a few visible traces remain today. The same Master Plan also outlines the complex history of another key location in the Milan that never was: the Porta Garibaldi district, which at the time was designated as the site of the city’s ultra-modern Centro Direzionale (Directional Center, the business district).

In the 1950s and 1960s, the relocation of the Varesine terminus railway station – later renamed Porta Garibaldi – opened up significant space for redevelopment. This paved the way for the construction of several office buildings, towers, and (small) skyscrapers. Among these was the elegant but now largely lost Municipal Technical Offices bridge on Via Melchiorre Gioia, designed by Vittorio Gandolfi, Aldo Putelli, Renato Bazzoni, and Luigi Fratino (1955–1966). However, funding ran out, priorities shifted, and the vision faltered. What was meant to be a bustling modern district instead became a barren void in Milan’s urban fabric, lingering for at least four decades.

However, architects and planners never stopped envisioning its potential. A 1979 competition organized by Casabella magazine drew submissions from Italian luminaries: Gae Aulenti proposed interconnected squares; Vittorio Gregotti envisioned a long, open void bordered by buildings; and Vittoriano Viganò imagined a megastructure fusing architecture and public space. Later, in 1991, Pier Luigi Nicolin introduced a series of projects that inched closer to realization. By 2001, his revised proposal retained a vast open public space at the center, pushing construction to the periphery. Elements of Nicolin’s void live on in today’s BAM (Biblioteca degli Alberi di Milano, or Library of Trees), while the surrounding towers – some of the tallest in Italy – are heirs to his envisioned built volumes.

The Milan that never was – its themes, its places – often evolves alongside its twin, the Milan that did. During the interwar period, as the city expanded rapidly and its population surged, bold visions for Milan’s future emerged. Among the most ambitious was the Milano Verde (Green Milan) project of 1938, developed by a team of architects including Franco Albini, Ignazio Gardella, Giulio Minoletti, and others.

This project stands as perhaps the most daring and visionary expression of a modernist Milan: a city of linear buildings meticulously aligned along the heliothermal axis, proposed to rise on the ruins of bourgeois neighborhoods in the western part of the city. Though never realized, its spirit endures. The soaring INA skyscraper (1953-1958) and Piero Bottoni’s residential building on Corso Sempione are regarded by architectural historians as the spiritual successors of the “Green Milan” that was never built.

Decades later, during the tumultuous period of deindustrialization in the 1980s, the reimagining of industrial spaces became a central urban theme. One of the most significant competitions of that era revolved around the transformation of the Pirelli factories in Bicocca. In 1985, Vittorio Gregotti won the competition, but the visions of 18 other internationally acclaimed designers also left a mark. Among these unrealized concepts, the proposal by the Turin-based duo Roberto Gabetti and Aimaro Isola stands out: their plans revived traces and patterns of the pre-urbanized landscape, rediscovering these as structuring elements of the district’s postmodern urban form.

The story of the Milan that never was could stretch on indefinitely, crossing eras, neighborhoods, and scales of urban construction. It would reveal an alternative history to the more familiar narrative, which focuses on completed works and realized transformations. Often, these two stories run parallel; at times, they overlap, their boundaries blurred.

Consider, for example, urban plans whose implementation spans decades, subject to constant revisions and reimaginings – such as the Santa Giulia district, a chimera of Milan in the 2000s that today seems closer to materializing.

Then there are grand public buildings, announced to the citizenry with much fanfare and nearly taken for granted, only to languish indefinitely in the archives of City Hall. Who remembers the rendering of Daniel Libeskind’s wildly twisting Museum of Contemporary Art, with Letizia Moratti smiling gleefully beside it during the 2011 mayoral campaign? Or the BEIC (European Library of Information and Culture) in Porta Vittoria? The first competition for the BEIC dates back to 2001, won by Bolles+Wilson, though only now, under the designs of Onsitestudio and Baukuh, is the project finally under construction.

And then there is one of the most enduring subjects of debate among Milan’s politicians and citizens: the reopening of the Navigli canals. Periodically, images of reopened canals – varying in location and form – circulate in architectural journals and the general media, sparking fascination among the nostalgic and bemusement among pragmatists, only to vanish just as quickly into oblivion.

Are these glimpses of a Milan that once was, a Milan yet to be, or a Milan that will never come? Only time will tell.

Opening image: Via Pirelli/Via Fara, Master Plan 1953. Courtesy of the Riccardo Lo Faro Collection