Parco Sempione: Milan's Living Room and the City Behind the Castle

Parco Sempione is the large green space that fills the gap between Castello Sforzesco and the Arco della Pace, 47 hectares of English-landscape garden designed by Emilio Alemagna in 1888 on the former castle grounds. The park functions as Milan's living room — the place where the city goes to eat lunch on a bench, walk dogs on leashes that are technically required but rarely enforced, jog circuits in the early morning, and conduct the kind of extended conversation that apartment life does not permit. In summer it fills with families, students from the Politecnico and Bocconi who live in the Sempione neighbourhood, and the aperitivo crowd who occupy the outdoor tables of the park's cafés from late afternoon until the gates close at 9pm.

The Torre Branca, a slender steel observation tower designed by Gio Ponti in 1933 for the Triennale di Milano, stands within the park's grounds and offers one of the best elevated perspectives on the city — the view from the top, on a clear day, extends to the Alps north of the city and encompasses the full geometry of the castle, the Duomo spires to the south, and the Porta Nuova towers to the northeast. The Triennale di Milano museum itself, in a 1930s Rationalist building at the park's eastern edge, maintains a permanent collection of Italian design and hosts temporary exhibitions of contemporary architecture and design that are reliably among the city's most intellectually serious. The Aquarium, one of Europe's oldest, occupies a Liberty-style building near the Castello entrance and continues its modest, earnest operation largely unbothered by contemporary expectations.

The Sempione neighbourhood surrounding the park — Corso Sempione running northwest toward Fiera Milano, Via Canonica and its parallel streets filling with local commerce — provides the residential texture that transforms the park from mere green space into a genuine neighbourhood amenity. The bars along Via Palermo and the surrounding streets have developed a low-key aperitivo culture distinct from the Navigli's high-energy version: smaller venues, more regular clientele, the kind of spritz consumed as daily habit rather than social performance. The Arco della Pace at the park's western exit, a triumphal arch commissioned by Napoleon and completed under the Austrians in 1838, provides a suitably grand full stop to a park that earns its place as the city's most used and most loved open space.