Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 04/06/2026 16:39:00

A slender steel lattice piercing the trees of the Parco Sempione in central Milan, the Torre Branca rises just over a hundred and eight metres above the park and offers one of the best views over the city. Designed by the great Italian architect Gio Ponti and built in only sixty-eight days, the tower was inaugurated in August 1933 for the fifth Milan Triennale. The tower height was carefully calibrated by the regime of the time to fall a few centimetres short of the gilded Madonnina on top of the Duomo, in keeping with Mussolini decree that no profane structure should rise above the divine. At a hundred and eight point six metres, the tower remains the tenth tallest building in Milan, dwarfed now by the modern skyscrapers of Porta Nuova and CityLife but still a landmark in its district. The hexagonal steel frame, designed by Ponti with the engineers Cesare Chiodi and Ettore Ferrari, was avant-garde for its day, exploiting high-strength steel tubes that allowed the structure to climb so high while remaining slender. A lift in the centre of the frame carries visitors to the observation deck at the top in around a minute. The tower was originally called the Torre Littoria, after the fasces of the Fascist regime that commissioned it. After the Second World War it was renamed Torre del Parco, and following its long closure and the major restoration funded by the Branca distillery in the late 1990s, it reopened in 2002 as the Torre Branca. From the top, on a clear day, the view stretches across the rooftops of Milan to the Alps to the north and the Apennines to the south, with the cathedral, the Castello Sforzesco and the modern skyline of the Porta Nuova district laid out below. A small lounge bar at the foot of the tower spills out into the park. The tower opens for visits on selected days of the week with limited hours, and small groups are taken to the top together to manage the load on the lift, making it an unhurried but slightly old-fashioned experience that captures something of the lighter side of the modernist architecture of the 1930s.