With its monumental façade, ornated with Roman-style columns, pedestals, and huge statues — naked men, winged horses, lions’ heads and gargoyles, for starters — Milan’s main train station is a tourist sight in its own right. This is a city that doesn’t do things by halves — the city’s iconic Duomo is Italy’s largest cathedral. But the station goes one further — it’s one of the largest in Europe.
Breathtaking from the outside, it’s no less spectacular inside. Travelers walk in through monumental entrances on three sides to an interior where vast staircases sweep upstairs to the departures hall with its mosaic flooring and sculpted walls. Trains depart from the 21 platforms that make up the main area of this magnificent station, which opened in 1931.
It’s bombastic and stylish — and was the perfect introduction to the 2026 Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics earlier this year. “L’emozione di essere italiani” declared posters all over the station — “the thrill of being Italian.” The phrase was even projected in green, red and white lights — the colors of the Italian flag — on the façade.
Yet the building also represents another, less spectacular part of Italy — its fascist history.
Not only is the station one of the most famous buildings in the country to be completed during fascism — while designed in a previous period, it was “tweaked” to add symbols of Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship, which are still visible — but beneath the main passenger facilities lies a concealed platform that was used for horrifying purposes during World War II.
Continue reading the complete article on the original source
