North Milan, The Bersagliere and the Koreas
Good morning Folkriders ,
It's often said that to gauge a city's pride and sense of belonging, it's necessary to start from the health of its industrial fabric. Think of cities like Terni and Ivrea. Like Pittsburgh or Youngstown in America. Like Wolfsburg in Germany or Manchester in England. Places where labor is the paper and ink on which citizens' identity documents are printed. Where it is labor that holds the community together, gives it a place on the map, teaches it to fly its flag. Certainly at the cost of great sacrifices. Of lives spent in harsh, exhausting environments, unaccustomed to color.
That's why, for this new adventure, we chose the GR116T LASER WAVE . We wanted to bring our palette to the streets of a world perhaps forgotten today, but unexpectedly capable of bringing together, on the same plate, ingredients so disparate from one another, as if to unite, across generations, heroes great and small, united by hard work and dedication. We wanted to pay homage to the northern Milan of the past, which, in its constant oscillation between Brianza and the glamorous city center, was not only a productive hub, but also a multifaceted world, a vital space capable of attracting workers from all over Italy and hosting industrial excellence of national importance.
We spoke, you'll remember, of sacrifices, of urban and certainly social hardships. We designed our Giro with the intention of keeping its memory alive, of highlighting the contradictions typical of that historical era, so recent in time, yet so distant from the iconography of today's Milan. And we were rewarded, finding even more than we were looking for along the way.
We started from the Portello area , now a hub comprising a shopping center and park, located just steps from the modern City Life district. It was once home to the Alfa Romeo factory complex, which operated until 1986. Where the entrance gate to the large complex once stood, the GR116T LASER WAVE inaugurated this mid-October ride, illuminating the morning mist and the memory of the long lines of workers who passed through that gate every day. From memory, in this area of the city, it is very easy to move on to the tangible: a few hundred metres away, after having briefly travelled along Viale Serra and cut to the left before entering the ring road, you enter Bovisa . And the air immediately becomes permeated, as can only happen where the countryside gives way to industry, and where industry disappears to make way for the future.
A cycle that saw its classic development in this neighborhood, combining vast expanses of once-agricultural land with large-scale construction. And so, with a little imagination, it's enough to visualize the large trucks leaving the factories, the constantly shifting chimneys and smokestacks, the hardness of the steel and the delicateness of the glassware, the gas enveloping the sheet metal, the pungent smell of sulfur that transformed the farmhouse neighborhood into a city whose veins once flowed with copper and coal.
We are in a Milan marked by workers' stigmata. We are in the Milan of the Koreas .
That's right, it seems incredible, on our route between Portello and Parco Nord, amidst green and modern areas, we close our eyes again and search for those makeshift homes, with almost no basic services, where so many workers, especially from Southern Italy, flocked to seek new employment opportunities in large industries. Those settlements – precarious and self-built – They took their name from the Korean War, fought during the same period in which this particular real estate, urban and above all social phenomenon saw its exponential growth. They were also called Koreas because, architecturally speaking, they recalled the typical houses of the popular neighborhoods of Korean cities.
Except that, in the Milanese Koreas, they didn't speak an Asian language. Neapolitan, Calabrian, Sicilian, Apulian, but also Venetian and Lombard; in those neighborhoods, it was the mix of dialects and geographical origins that left a fundamental mark on the industrial history of North Milan . And on the streets of what today, perhaps more than ever, remains a land of transit, always torn between past and future, we experience firsthand the sense of (re)discovering a true era. It's not for nothing that, in these cases, we speak of industrial archaeology . And we, like urban explorers always on the hunt for stories, after leaving the ghost of old Bovisa behind us, rush toward the next gem.
Once past Parco Nord, leaving Bresso behind, a further detour of a few kilometres to the left, the objective is Cinisello Balsamo: we are looking for the monument to the Champion Bersagliere . Because the Northern Milan we are talking about today, industrious and accustomed to hard work, in addition to having given birth to great brands of historic bicycles, It also produced some top runners. Carlo Oriani , born in Balsamo in 1888, was one of its greatest representatives.
They called him El Pucia , because, according to a deeply Milanese expression, he used to "scarpetta" (to mop up the sauce) with bread, so as to mop up all the sauce on his plates and have nothing left after eating. Memories of a childhood of hunger, which nevertheless did not prevent him from turning professional, winning the 1913 Giro d'Italia, and duelling with the best of the era. Then came the Great War, interrupting his competitive career and his life: enlisted as a Bersagliere, he contracted fatal pneumonia after diving into the Tagliamento River to save a comrade during the Caporetto defeat, and died a few weeks later in Caserta, where he had been taken in a last-ditch effort to cure him, thanks also to a more favorable and healthy climate.
In Cinisello—though when Oriani was born there, he was still simply called Balsamo—it's not easy to find the monument commemorating him. It's located in a small section of park between two bike paths, between Via Ariosto and Via Monte Ortigara. A few steps in the medium-height grass pay homage to the statue of the Bersagliere and the relief by Pucia, who, we're sure, will happily return the favor. It's cycling heroes like him, always poised in the folds of history, who provide us with constant inspiration and passion. And who make us set out on a new journey.
An essential stop, perhaps the most iconic: Sesto San Giovanni . Close to everything, yet unique and distinct. Neither Monza nor Milan, neither village nor city; and yet, a bit of both. From the monument to the Bersagliere, passing in front of the evocative Cinisello Cathedral , we wind through narrow streets and after a few minutes Sesto already appears. "Gold Medal of the Resistance" proclaim the signs at the entrance to the city, where, it's immediately clear, there's no room for frills and glitter. Today's Sesto, in fact, while not sacrificing the modernity of its shops and nightlife venues, has an unshakeable industrial DNA. Already in the distance, arriving from the northwest, the skeletons of the large buildings of the Falck Area begin to appear, and in particular what was once known as Comparto Unione, a site that reached nearly one million square meters at its peak. Viale Italia bisects this immense area, flanked by the Bramme warehouse and the water tower, not to mention the former workers' village reminiscent of the most typical terraced houses of British industrial cities. It's as if Birmingham and Sesto were connected by a stainless steel cable, a reminder of the golden age of the steel industry. What's particularly striking is the contrast between the vast open spaces—now underutilized, but once necessary for industrial development—and the density of traffic, buildings, and people, which increases proportionally as the GR 116 T LASER WAVE heads toward Milan.
Indeed, it is at the gates of the metropolis that the dynastic reference changes, passing from Falck to Breda, another historic name in Italian heavy industry. The old Breda complex, now used as an events and concert venue, is just steps from the stadium—also named after founder Ernesto Breda—which is home to Pro-Sesto, the city's main football club, almost as if to create a compact hub in the name of a company that once stood out in the national mechanical manufacturing industry. In what is now known as the ex Breda Industrial Archaeological Park, some of those excellences can be found, including the FS 830 locomotive and the ingot wagon, as well as the mammoth overhead crane, once indispensable for the movement of packages and semi-finished products. We were able to observe all this by pushing the GR 116 T LASER WAVE on the cycle path named after Luigi Malabrocca , the historic Black Jersey of the Giro d'Italia, one of the many cycle paths that have sprung up in recent years here in Sesto. All things considered, it's the last path we travel before returning to Milan, the Greco area, formerly the Pirelli skyscraper, now replaced by the Bicocca University complex and the shopping center, where the whistle of freight trains quickly became thick with soot and lampblack, but not only that. Traces of neorealist cinema and places even contemplated by Manzoni's epic—it's said that Renzo lived on Via Carlo Conti before arriving in a plague-torn Milan—are the last setting in which we regain our most familiar landmarks. And the frenetic pulse of the metropolis welcomes us with open arms.
The Giro ends here, right behind Milan's Central Station. Right at the beginning of Via Cristoforo Gluck . And if you think, dear Folkriders, that the choice was not a coincidence, we'll happily admit it ourselves: there's no more iconic street to bid a fitting farewell to a bygone Milan.
The track: https://www.komoot.com/it-it/tour/2629492828?share_token=aQ1JE4f1o7iwdZ4p6iOw6As8OcMLuur5JleWsMwAPY3Fif8QDA&ref=wtd