The past and the Ticinello

The past and the Austrian mockery.
The Fiera-Sempione district extends over a large area of the Milanese territory ranging from the neighboring areas of the City Life area with the purely “Fiera” part (which we refer to in our article “City Life District”), to the entire part of the homonymous Corso and at the Arco della Pace. The Fiera / Sempione district is the area closest to Corso Sempione (and the adjacent streets), which is the epilogue of the Sempione road, initially built in the Napoleonic era in 1801, to connect Milan to Paris. The urban planning that characterizes it is structured according to the neoclassical fashion of the time and the Corso leads in perspective to the Arco della Pace, the latter initially named Arco del Trionfo and built in 1806 by the architect Luigi Cagnola to celebrate Eugenio’s wedding of Beauharnais, Deputy King of Italy and adopted son of Napoleon. Subsequently, again by Cagnola, the final structure was completed in honor of the battle won in Jena; the works resumed at the end of 1926 under the Austrian dominion which dedicated it in honor of the peace reached by the European nations in 1815 through the congresses of Vienna. A noteworthy curiosity: the Austrians rotated their horses 180 degrees so that their backs turned towards France as an act of mockery. Returning to Corso Sempione, it ends in Piazza Firenze which in the past was a well-known roundabout for the carriages of the nobles. Here, too, from the middle of the Corso towards the outskirts, as in other areas of Milan, it was initially mainly countryside and then over the years, particularly from the 1930s, it was increasingly urbanized and included in the City.