Overview
A wide bundle of railway tracks isolated - some say the name is derived from this - the working-class neighbourhood from the rest of the city, even though it was very close to the Central Station. The first urban planning and traffic interventions in the long process of reorganisation of the area, which would lead to the creation of the overall Porta Nuovadistrict practically from scratch, had already begun before 2000 to introduce an alternative, though always quiet, atmosphere here, between social centres, the avant-garde but inexpensive programming of the Verdi Theatre on Via Pastrengo, the Via Volturno where the Italian Communist Party had its Milanese headquarters and above all the central Piazza Tito Minniti.
Today, however, there is anIsland further away from Porta Nuova, which still looks almost as it did at the end of the last millennium, and another, vice versa, hyper-modernised Island at the base of the double skyscraper Bosco Verticale, with the Italian headquarters of Google and the House of Memory on opposite sides. The latter is a building for open-access exhibitions and public meetings on the subject of historically documented remembrance of partisans, war deportees and victims of terrorism. The city has also opened an area of digital intervention called 'Milano è memoria' (Milan is memory), with no ideological distinctions between the Shoah - to which a memorial is dedicated next to the Central Station at Platform 21, where deportees were forced onto freight wagons towards the crematoria - and the exodus of the Giuliano-Dalmatian Italians from Istria and Dalmatia.
Isola in a way encapsulates a good part of the essence of Milan, in this integrated ensemble of past and present, made up of period houses amidst ultra-modern skyscrapers, sophisticated fashion boutiques and art galleries, jazz music venues alongside trendy restaurants, pubs and lounge bars that are concentrated on Via Pollaiuolo.
Isola, Milano MI, Italia
