A nearly two-kilometre straight commercial street running northeast from the Porta Venezia to the Piazzale Loreto, Corso Buenos Aires is one of the longest and busiest shopping streets in Europe, with more than three hundred and fifty shops along its length. The street name commemorates the historical ties between Milan and the Argentine capital, home to a large Italian diaspora in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The route follows the line of the old Roman road that left the city through the eastern gate, and the street long served as the main artery into the city from Bergamo and Brescia. The opening of a new urban gate at Porta Venezia in the early nineteenth century, with its impressive neoclassical pavilions, set the line of the modern thoroughfare, and the building of the Lazaretto further northeast in the same period encouraged urban development along the route. The Lazaretto, the great quarantine hospital built in the late fifteenth century to deal with outbreaks of plague, was largely demolished in the late nineteenth century to make room for the residential and commercial expansion of the city. The street as it exists today took its current shape in the great urban planning programmes of the post-unification decades. In the postwar years Corso Buenos Aires emerged as one of the principal shopping streets of Milan, with the great Italian and international chains opening branches along its length. The mix is firmly mainstream, with the major fast-fashion brands, sporting goods stores, electronics chains, bookshops and pharmacies catering to a broad popular market rather than the high-end luxury of the Quadrilatero d Oro further south. A particularly distinctive feature of the street is the broad pedestrian arcades that run along much of its length on both sides, sheltering shoppers from the rain in winter and the sun in summer. Small side streets running off the main thoroughfare lead to residential blocks that include some of the finest examples of Milanese Liberty and Art Deco architecture in the city. The street is easily reached by the M1 red metro line, with stops at Porta Venezia, Lima and Loreto serving its different sections. A walk along its length, with stops for a coffee or a quick lunch in one of the cafes, gives a vivid sense of everyday Milanese consumer life away from the boutiques and tourist circuits of the centre.

Type: Street

Address: Corso Buenos Aires, Milan, Italy