Open House Milano, to discover the sensational places of the city (and its air-raid shelter)

There is the crypt of the Holy Sepulcher and a former railway yard, the air-raid shelter in Piazza Grandi and the Giuseppe Verdi conservatory, and much, much more: Open House Milano is back this weekend, Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 Maythe event – now in its seventh edition this year – which allows visitors to visit around a hundred sites including historic buildings, churches, galleries and museums, former industrial buildings, private homes and places of urban qualification often little known to the Milanese themselves.

A few examples? The air-raid shelter in Piazza Grandi, one of the few accessible to the public and built in 1936 to contain – in case of danger – up to 450 people, or the church of San Nicolao della Flue in piazza Dalmaziadesigned by Ignazio Gardella in 1968 inspired by a large overturned ship, or still the Arcimboldi theater and the Giuseppe Verdi conservatoryestablished in 1808 with the Napoleonic Royal Decree, the Sormani library And Rustic house, built in the 1930s for Giuseppe Terragni and Pietro Lingeri. And then there crypt of the Holy Sepulcher within which, according to tradition, the land that the Crusaders brought back from Jerusalem in the Middle Ages is preserved. Great attention then, as usual, to those places that are still in progress: here are peripheral areas that, thanks to the redevelopment, aim to become part of an increasingly polycentric city, such as the Farini airport and it Lambrate airportpart of a larger project that aims to create new neighborhoods starting from abandoned railway yards.

Different places, as we have seen, very different times and spaces, but all united by the common desire to enhance the architectural heritage of the city that knows how to reinvent itself and always renew itself without losing its identity: it is not for nothing that the theme chosen for this edition is the lasting city, a space in which conservation is linked to redevelopment and reuse, giving rise to an almost dreamlike image in which history merges with the present.

Participating in the usual way is simple and free: the reservation, compulsory, is done directly from the website of Open House Milanwhere it is also possible to consult the entire program of the event.