Things to Do in Sempione

Sempione sits in the northwest curve of Milan's inner ring, breathing through 386,000 square metres of lawns, chestnuts and gravel paths where Milanese families spread picnic blankets on Sunday mornings and design-school students sketch the lake's ducks. The air here carries something rare in this city: damp grass and fallen leaves rather than espresso and exhaust. At its eastern hinge stands Castello Sforzesco, its terracotta towers warming to amber in late-afternoon light, while the Arco della Pace closes the axis to the northwest like a full stop you walk underneath. The residential streets fanning out from the park, Via Canonica, Corso Sempione itself, Via Giovanni da Procida, have the unhurried quality of a neighbourhood that knows it doesn't need to prove itself. The buildings are bourgeois early-twentieth-century, many still trailing wrought-iron balconies heavy with geraniums in summer. You'll stumble across an independent bookshop wedged between a dry cleaner and a ceramic workshop; a latteria that has been selling fresh pasta to the same families since the 1970s. Sempione doesn't feel touristic because, for the most part, it isn't. The neighbourhood draws architects and designers who come for the Triennale, arguably Italy's most important design museum, and families who want park space that central Milan rations jealously. On Friday evenings the mood shifts: Bar Bianco inside the park fills with young professionals doing aperitivo in its garden, the clink of Campari glasses echoing under the plane trees as the sky purples over the castle towers.

Ride the M1 red line to Cadorna. Eight minutes from Duomo drops you at the castle gate. Pagano and Amendola-Fiera cover the west. Tram 1 rattles down Corso Sempione every ten minutes. Walking beats everything. Castello to Arco della Pace is a lazy twenty through green. BikeMi stations sit at both ends. Flat paths, quiet streets. Taxis swarm the castle side all night.