Description
Porta Venezia is the northeastern entrance to Milan, where Corso Venezia opens into Piazza Oberdan. It consists of two neoclassical toll houses decorated with statues, one of the gates opened in the Spanish bastions that no longer exist.
Through this gate Renzo Tramaglino entered Milan, in "The Betrothed." And from here, according to seventeenth-century chronicles, the plague of 1630 also entered, in the clothes of a soldier who had fled the Landsknechts.
Back then it was called Porta Orientale and opened onto the road to Gorgonzola. It faced Vienna, and it was the first gate they thought of rebuilding in monumental form. But it was not an easy undertaking.
Giuseppe Piermarini began the work in 1787, but criticism stopped him. Cagnola's temporary arches followed, for the wedding of Viceroy Eugène and for the arrival of Emperor Francis I. None of them ever became marble.
In 1826 a competition with 32 entrants was won by Rodolfo Vantini of Brescia. The Milanese were disappointed: they had expected a triumphal arch and found two toll houses, so low that in 1829 they had to be raised.
To redeem them came the sculptures in 1833: eight larger-than-life statues, each in a niche, from Minerva to Mercury, from Ceres to Vulcan, and eight bas-reliefs on the history of Milan.
The reliefs run from the founding of the city to the Lombard League, up to the entry of Maximian Herculius and Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti. The statues facing the center are Eternity, Concord, Justice and Fidelity.
In 1860 the gate was renamed Porta Venezia, in the name of the city that remained Austrian after the war of 1859. The complex has the weight of a customs barrier, not of a triumphal gate. In 1882 the square was named after Guglielmo Oberdan, the irredentist hanged by the Austrians.
Here you will find the stop for Metro line 1 (red) and the station of the suburban railway link, in Piazza Oberdan, where as many as eight streets converge.
Through this gate Renzo Tramaglino entered Milan, in "The Betrothed." And from here, according to seventeenth-century chronicles, the plague of 1630 also entered, in the clothes of a soldier who had fled the Landsknechts.
Back then it was called Porta Orientale and opened onto the road to Gorgonzola. It faced Vienna, and it was the first gate they thought of rebuilding in monumental form. But it was not an easy undertaking.
Giuseppe Piermarini began the work in 1787, but criticism stopped him. Cagnola's temporary arches followed, for the wedding of Viceroy Eugène and for the arrival of Emperor Francis I. None of them ever became marble.
In 1826 a competition with 32 entrants was won by Rodolfo Vantini of Brescia. The Milanese were disappointed: they had expected a triumphal arch and found two toll houses, so low that in 1829 they had to be raised.
To redeem them came the sculptures in 1833: eight larger-than-life statues, each in a niche, from Minerva to Mercury, from Ceres to Vulcan, and eight bas-reliefs on the history of Milan.
The reliefs run from the founding of the city to the Lombard League, up to the entry of Maximian Herculius and Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti. The statues facing the center are Eternity, Concord, Justice and Fidelity.
In 1860 the gate was renamed Porta Venezia, in the name of the city that remained Austrian after the war of 1859. The complex has the weight of a customs barrier, not of a triumphal gate. In 1882 the square was named after Guglielmo Oberdan, the irredentist hanged by the Austrians.
Here you will find the stop for Metro line 1 (red) and the station of the suburban railway link, in Piazza Oberdan, where as many as eight streets converge.