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Design is an integral part of the culture of Milano and Lombardy. A dense network of public and company museums, studios and private archives testify to its historical contribution to the city’s heritage.
Our itinerary starts from a new museum inaugurated in May 2021 at 7, via Ceresio, quite close to Cimitero Monumentale. ADI Design Museum Compasso d'Oro effectively combines the past and the future, thanks to a substantial exhibition of objects awarded with the ADI Compasso D'Oro - the most prestigious Italian design award. It is also home to temporary exhibitions, lectures, labs, and a bookshop.
Continue to the Achille Castiglioni Studio Museum in Piazza Castello. Not far, in Viale Alemagna, stands the Triennale building, where since April 9, 2019, the Museum of Italian Design displays a selection of the most iconic and representative items of Italian design in a permanent setting. On towards Pagano, in via Telesio, the Franco Albini Foundation houses the craftman architect’s archive.
The Kartell Museum is located in Noviglio, about twenty kilometers from Milano, while north of the city it is possible to visit the Giovanni Sacchi Archive in Sesto San Giovanni, within Museo dell’Industria e del Lavoro (Museum of Industry and Labour).
Definitely not to be missed the annual Milano Design Week. On the occasion of the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, a world must for everything house, furniture and lighting, the whole Milano area is filled with hundreds of initiatives and events connected to creativity and design.
The exhibition opens to the city and involves non-insiders as well. The Fuorisalone includes itineraries, exhibitions in the most charming locations unbeknownst in the city, events in very special places, cocktails in shops and showrooms, open-air celebrations and meetings with architects and designers in bookshops.
Inaugurated on May 25th, 2021, one of the largest museums in Europe dedicated to design opens its doors to the public, a completely renovated extension of the historic collection of Italian industrial design objects awarded by the prestigious Compasso D'Oro ADI - Association for Industrial Design.
The 5,135m2 venue, no longer reserved exclusively for professionals, will feature over 2000 objects that have been granted the Compasso d'Oro accolade from 1954 to today, plus, thematic exhibitions, spaces dedicated to business meetings and public events, a library, the ADI head office and historical archive, a bookstore and a befittingly design-conscious eatery.
Since April 9th, 2019 at the Triennale di Milano, the Museum of Italian Design directed by Joseph Grima has been presenting in a permanent exhibition a selection of the most iconic and representative pieces of Italian design, part of the 1,600 items in the Triennale Collection.
Established thirty years after the death of the architect Franco Albini, the foundation has been awarded national heritage status by the Italian State. It brings together more than twenty thousand drawings, an endless photographic archive, as well as letters, writings, models and important works of design.
Within these large luminous rooms designer Achille Castiglioni’s ideas and projects were conceived and nurtured. Now open to the public, the studio has remained unchanged since the designer passed away in 2002 and, thanks to an agreement between the Castiglioni family and the Triennale, the projects, models, drawings, photographs and objects that testify to the designer’s sixty years of activity have all been catalogued and stored.
Recreated on a renovated industrial area the Fabbrica del Vapore is now synonymous with creativity and culture: a workshop of experiences, new languages, verbal and graphic expressions and cutting-edge technologies.
The Kartell museum, designed by Ignazio Gardella and Anna Castelli Ferrieri, is located little more than twenty kilometres south of Milano. Here visitors can trace the history of the company’s production in more than a thousand design objects produced since 1949.
A model-making laboratory for industrial design and architecture. For years this has been an important location in the history of project design in Italy and is now available to students and enthusiasts within the Museo dell’Industria e del Lavoro in Sesto San Giovanni.
Inaugurated in 1999 to testify of the firm’s history since 1921, it is located inside the factory. This archive/museum has a double purpose: to combine the conservation and research needs of an archive with those of a space for design collection.
A visit to the Galleria Campari offers a unique and exclusive experience focused on the worlds of art, communications and photography - that made the Campari brand distinctive and admired worldwide. It means entering a laboratory of images and emotions in which the brand history – made up of brilliant insights, sophisticated advertising campaigns, a cutting-edge communications strategy – continues to project the brand into the future.
The headquarters of the Distillerie Fratelli Branca in via Resegone, one of the few factories still active in Milano, is home to the Branca Museum exhibition space. Here, the company narrates its 170 years of history, with its aromatic spices, the tools that innovated a traditional process, and the visual support of its advertising campaigns.
