Cities

Unknown Milano: Ortica – The Street Art Museum

I’m glad to introduce you to my last photo-reportage project: Unknown Milan: Ortica – The Street Art Museum.
I have been working for months on a reportage that could best describe the neighbourhood, that from 4 years, I’ve been calling home. Year after year has been evolving as a community and a little big village in a multicultural city. Now, thanks to the project “Orme Ortica” it became an open-air street art museum. Let’s discover it!

Unknown Milan: Ortica – The Street Art Museum

Now as never, the valorisation of small neighbourhoods such Ortica has to go through creativity and art, being able to start a requalification that may open the gates of always more sustainable tourism. Being able to attract not only new people and tourists but also to stimulate the flow of new lifeblood among locals.

An artwork in Via Corelli, dedicated to various rapper from Milan.

Ortica historically has been a “working-class” suburb, housing the workers of Milan being just out of the city. As the city has been growing it has been included in the urban spirit but yet preserving the mood and the configuration of a little Italian village. In the last years, for strange circumstances, it became a creative hub for artists and creatives coming from all over Italy. Getting populated with small little bars and restaurants, that have been able to perfectly mix and integrate themselves with the “old icons” such as the “Balera” or “Il Circolino”.

“Il Circolino” is one of the oldest and most iconic restaurant/bar in Ortica.

Rebirth

Now, walking around Ortica feels like walking in a super colourful and multicultural little village while being, at the same time, in the heart of a modern and ultra-digitalised metropolis. Being able in few step to go through all the history of the last century, the antifascism activism and the cultural/artistic scene of a city called Milan.

We all bleed the same colour.

In Milan living under the shadow of the Duomo has been always a great privilege. But finally also in Ortica, there is a suburb Duomo, a more pop version. Not only, as said before, around the streets of the new street-art neighbourhood, you’ll not find only the recent history of the city but also icon monument and faces that made the city bigger. First, of all the “Madonnina”, always watching the city from the top.

“La Madonnina” the iconic statue, a symbol of Milan, reproduced in a “suburb pop” version.

The central nave of the duomo, now visible also in Ortica

Are you curious of learning more about the “Street Art Museum” of Milan?