There’s so much to enjoy there, from the richly sculptured exterior, to the interior with its stunning stained glass, to the city views from the rooftop. One of the landmarks you can see from the top is Velasca Tower, or Torre Velasca.
There’s no way you can miss its distinctive, eye-catching shape. There aren’t many high-rises around whose top floors are wider than the ones below.
Torre Velasca was completed in 1958. It has 26 stories and rises around 106 meters high, but even when it was first constructed it wasn’t the tallest building in Milan—that honor went to Pirelli Tower, which was built around the same time.
But despite their concurrent construction, the two buildings were never rivals. It’s actually interesting how dissimilar they turned out, with completely different circumstances leading to completely different designs.
Milan was nearly leveled by fierce air raids during World War II, thanks to its central importance to Italian industry and its economy. The presence of so many military installations and factories made it a key target for enemy attacks.
The Milanese faced confusion along with countless difficulties and problems during the postwar years. Those who lived through it all remember how hard they had to work and how much they relied on each other. The locals who helped me out the most when I first moved to Italy—acquaintances I hardly knew, yet who never treated me differently because I was foreign—were the people of that generation.
Torre Velasca was built to be a symbol of Milan’s reconstruction during those hard times. The distinctive design incorporates the style of old medieval fortresses infused with a modernist aesthetic, and has been celebrated for the way its contemporary elements still respect the historical context of the region. It has been preserved as a cultural treasure to this day.
The top floor has a café, restaurant, and shops, while the other floors are primarily offices with a few residences as well.
The other iconic structure from that time, Pirelli Tower, is relatively close by. It is owned by the famous Italian industrial group and built using cutting-edge technology and design of the day. It has a slim, modern exterior and uses modern construction methods that combine glass and steel.
A small plane crashed into the building in the spring of 2002, killing the pilot and two others. It happened less than a year after the Twin Towers collapse in 2001, so everyone immediately worried that it was a terrorist attack—when in fact the pilot simply got turned around in bad weather. The tower was repaired, and stood as a lesson to the Milanese to reinforce safety measures in their high-rises.
There have been many more skyscrapers constructed in Milan in recent years, but Torre Velasca and Pirelli Tower have a special historical value to the Milanese, serving as important links between their present and their past.
