Parco Industria Alfa Romeo, Portello

Parco Portello differs from other Milanese parks due to its innate landscape features and the attentive focus on design that undergirds it. Conceived as part of Gino Valle’s master plan for the Portello-Fiera area, the park’s hills make it recognisable even from a distance. The entire redevelopment process took place in conjunction with and in the style of the American landscape architect Charles Jencks (1939-2019). His legacy to the citizens of Milan is this project: a park where people can feel free to experience the rhythm of time.

Arriving in Milan by highway from the north, visitors can see two hills, one on the right and one on the left of the main road running into the city; both hills are artificial, but were built about sixty years apart: the one on the right, Monte Stella, is about 50m high and was constructed using rubble from World War II; the second, called Helix, is a little over 20m high and was built in the early 2000s using excavation materials from the demolition of the old Alfa Romeo factory that had been active from 1906 to 1986 in the Portello district, in what was known as the Alfa Romeo Area. The industrial complex was built on a service area bordering the grounds where the pavilions of Expo 1906 had once stood, in the open countryside to the northwest of the city. The urban park, which covers about 70,000m² of land, is the result of a collaboration between Charles Jencks (who died in 2019), a principal theorist of modernism and post-modernism in landscape architecture, and the LAND studio. At the summit of Helix, with its truncated cone shape, is a fountain/sculpture depicting the double helix of DNA, also the work of Charles Jencks.