Beyond his training as an architect – he was a graduate of Politecnico di Milano – the name of Italo Lupi stands as a foundation stone for Italian design culture as a graphic designer, art director, set designer, so much so that in commenting on a project he built for the University of Trento, Domus would once title “the graphic designer turns his hand to architecture”. Soon, in fact, Lupi had taken the path of visual design, of communicative design, when after a first experience as an assistant for the Castiglioni brothers he had then moved on to the development office of Rinascente, a company that was also the epicenter of the Compasso d'Oro award, to which the designer himself would remain linked for a long time, winning it several times and recently designing its Museum. Publishing was perhaps the realm of his highest expression, carried on as art director and then director at Abitare, and also as art director at Domus between 1986 and 1991: it was but the beginning of a relationship that even today we struggle to see as concluded, so much so that the Milanese dérive in which Lupi involved Domus in July 2015 – it would be published on issue 993 – not only has that absolute contemporary character that the designer’s vision on the city kept on channeling, but also gives the impression that it could be continued even in this very moment, with more steps to be added to a discourse that is intimate and at the same time capable of speaking to everyone, as Lupi’s projects have always been.

I shall start with the clump of buildings situated around the complicated crossroads called Le 5 Vie (“the five streets”) where there remains what I believe to be the only trace of the lacerations of the war: a stump of tears and pain that has been resisting ghostily for 71 years. I live in this neighbourhood, and relish the Sunday silence of abandoned offices. It is an area of aristocratic palazzi and triumphal balconies. Legend has it that the poet Ugo Foscolo climbed up one of them, across from my house, to reach the rooms of his beloved (his amica risanata) in Palazzo Fagnani, which is where much more recently, Noorda and Vignelli’s glorious Unimark had its luxurious headquarters. 

Let’s start from here and allow ourselves to take a winding, zigzag path. A city where streets are incomplete in their convergence, where places are crooked, piazzas too big (as the much-quoted Carlo Emilio Gadda used to say) and where the culture of building is great, allows us to do just that. We’ll head down Corso Magenta then, all in a rush so as not to fall right away into the sweet snares of Marchesi, Milan’s finest pasticceria with its beautiful, fairy-tale windows. We’ll pass the church of San Maurizio. Its tranquil Renaissance facade encloses a church hall made isolated and regal by frescos of extraordinary quality everywhere, painted by Ambrogio Bergognone and Bernardino Luini, who made a frescoed wall-to-wall tapestry to protect the music of big concerts. Then we reach the courtyards of two 17th-century palazzi, originally monasteries and then orphanages, one for boys, the Martinitt, and one for girls, the Stelline. 

The buildings were well restored in the 1970s under the mildly heavy hand of the architect Jan Battistoni. He did have the great idea to entrust the cloister floor to the extensive and bold design by Bobo Piccoli. Without many colours, it has a strong and very modern pictorial feel. Turning back towards Le 5 Vie, the building known as the Fuso d’Oro reawakens in us the cherished memory of Gigi Caccia Dominioni’s architecture. Only two of his buildings lie in the central area of the city, meaning we shall omit, alas, the masterpieces on the outskirts, which have windows cut at an angle into the solidness of isolated, cubic buildings. There is one building on Via Santa Maria alla Porta approaches the facade of the church next door with elegant respect, preserving its secrets behind the sobriety of a linear facade and darkened glass windows, flowingly aligned. The other, on Corso Italia, is a more three-dimensional red building made up of aspects and returns, little binary towers and a deducible complexity of destined uses.

Also on Corso Italia protrudes the powerful prow of a building like a ship: the extraordinary office complex designed by Luigi Moretti. Like an ultra-modern blade, it slices through the varied architecture of the evenly spread out surrounding buildings. 

We are still in the area I remember from my adolescence. Our long walks in the area around our school, Liceo Manzoni, led us to discover, just beyond the dull red (almost Caccia Dominioni’s shade of aubergine) of the restored Palazzo Visconti, the candidly contrasting stereometry of Mario Asnago and Claudio Vender’s perfect white parallelepiped, built right after World War II in Via Lanzone for Fabbrica Italiana Tubi e Ferrotubi. The fascinating building is clad in white marble and has rows of French doors. It has very clean lines and a sort of interspace of greenery almost like a conservatory – a modernist masterpiece of absolute purity, as concise as the basic design of their famous table with a white tubular frame, made for the 1936 Triennale. 

Thanks to the reduced and compact dimensions that Milan has as a true metropolis, not far from here is an area that gives an overview of urban traditions and new architecture: Via Festa del Perdono and Largo Richini. It is an oasis where you can stop and enjoy the contrast between the facade of the old Ospedale, which Francesco Sforza commissioned from the architect Filarete in the mid-15th century, and the newer tower built by BBPR: the Velasca. This robust, powerful project was designed controversially in 1956 as a de profundis of architectural internationalism, the final malady of rationalism. At sunset, the colours of the two buildings converge, the first darkening and the second brightening the pinkish hues of its marble-grit slabs. It is very pleasant to pause here a minute. The old Ospedale, today the Università Statale, is an example of experimental conservation: the skilful architect Liliana Grassi executed a precise labour of anastylosis, but also incorporated with intelligent bravery bold new structures that integrate perfectly with the original building. This exemplar of freedom has certainly been an inspiration to the architect Guido Canali for his future work. It was good to walk with him here and comment on the buildings in our fertile Polytechnic years. 

A separate itinerary could be dedicated to the work that today is forgotten of the architect Arrigo Arrighetti. It can be read as testimony to a historical period in which the technical department of the City of Milan was entrusted to a professional. His work is very serious proof of the tenacity of the reformist and social-democratic administrations in their pursuit of the high dignity of social building. It is clear in the primary school for the experimental quarter of QT8, in the conversion of Palazzo Sormani and its garden into the city’s library, and in the social housing in the Sant’Ambrogio districts 1 and 2, and in much more, for example his initial planning suggestions for the city’s first underground line.

Milan is a city of widespread building quality, of well-constructed building stock of the type that a skilled master mason makes. The quality is evident above all in certain quarters, such as Città Studi, where everything that was built in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s “automatically” makes my car slow down when I pass through it, to enjoy a better view of the solidity of the architecture and its perfection, which perfectly corresponds to the taste of the Polytechnic in those years. So it happens that you discover hidden streets, small roads that are treasure troves of interesting architecture. For example, visit if you can the tiny Via Giuseppe Longhi, a side-street of the more congested Viale Corsica, on the right-hand side as you go towards the airport. Within a short space are three long, little-known apartment buildings from the 1930s. Two were designed with great care by Giovanni Muzio, and the third by Alessandro Minali has a small, extroverted, tempietto on the street that could be the work of Portaluppi. One is yellow, one grey and one red; all with delicate, elegant finishes in metal. Across the road is a complex with a highly original 1960s design and tall wooden slats that mark out, strong as tall chimneys, the whole facade. The design is excellent, with clinker bricks and ceppo di gré (a conglomerate stone from Lombardy) enhancing the building’s dignity. Let’s stop, leave the centre and go well beyond the Navigli canals and the Spanish Walls (mura spagnole). We arrive at Cusago, where in the shadow of Bernabò Visconti’s castle we will search for the last surviving house of four designed by Renzo Piano in the early 1970s. Set in countryside that is still green and open, they were masterpieces of open-plan design, parallelepipeds of extraordinary simplicity and bright interiors.

Let’s go north now and visit a masterpiece of a church, the Santa Maria della Misericordia in Baranzate. It is a large nave, isolated in an outlying area of Milan that is not yet overcrowded, and was designed in 1957 to be a box radiant with light, a fully mature piece of work by Angelo Mangiarotti and Bruno Morassutti. The walls are luminous and sacred, screened by fibreglass panels, above which the structural trussing is strong and clearly visible, as in all Mangiarotti’s industrial construction systems. If one likes Mangiarotti, it is impossible to not visit the secular cathedrals he made as stations of the railway link at Piazza della Repubblica and Porta Venezia. Further eastwards there is Vittorio Gregotti’s Bicocca district, brought to life by trees and students, representing the metabolism process that makes it accepted even by those who rejected it at the time, in contrast to those of us who appreciated the power of his urban design right from the start. This brings our tour through the suburbs to a close. Let’s return to the centre and enjoy two views of an unusual Milan, which, in its own small way, is reminiscent of a baroque Rome. One is the broad space of Sant’Alessandro with its dominant 17th-century church, its angel with long trumpet, and the un-Milanese stillness of its piazza. For the second truly surprising view, stop on Piazza San Babila and look across towards Via Durini. The curve of the street forces the church of Santa Maria della Sanità to bend, take on the shape of a cello, and break the facade up into a baroque riot of exposed brickwork. Are we still in Milan?