Pirelli HangarBicocca

About this place

Seven reinforced-concrete towers, ninety tonnes each, standing between thirteen and nineteen metres tall and leaning just enough to look like somebody's structural error, under a ceiling thirty metres overhead. This is Anselm Kiefer's 'The Seven Heavenly Palaces', in place since the building opened as an art space in 2004, and it costs nothing to walk in and stand beneath it. The towers were cast around the angular corner modules of shipping containers, with lead books wedged between the levels, compressed under the weight. The title borrows from the Sefer Hechalot, an ancient Hebrew text describing a spiritual ascent through seven palaces, which changes how you stand under them. The building itself is not a Pirelli factory, whatever the guidebooks repeat. These halls went up in stages between the 1920s and the mid-1960s for Breda, which had been manufacturing in Bicocca since 1903, for assembling and testing locomotives, transformers and heavy electrical machinery. The largest of them, the Navate, built between 1963 and 1965 for the transformer department, keeps its original dimensions: roughly 9,500 square metres under that vast roof. The complex was turned into an art space in 2004, backed by Pirelli, and became one of the largest single-level exhibition spaces in Europe without a single rough edge smoothed away. Concrete floors, deliberately thin lighting, an echo that never quite settles. The roughness is half the pleasure; the other half is that work of a scale no conventional museum could physically house. On the exterior wall of the Cubo there is something that will mean more to Arab visitors than to most: a permanent 1,000-square-metre mural by the Tunisian-French artist eL Seed, titled Waves Only Exist Because the Wind Blows, unveiled in 2024 and rendered in his flowing Arabic script. It carries, in paraphrase, a line from Cesare Pavese's novel La luna e i falo, to the effect that everyone needs somewhere to belong to, if only for the sake of leaving it. You can see it from the street and from the railway yards beside it, with no ticket, no booking and no need to go inside at all. Finding Arabic letterforms at that size on a factory wall in northern Milan is a genuine surprise. Things worth knowing before you commit: it opens Thursday to Sunday only, closed three full days a week, which is where most visitors come unstuck. It sits north of the tourist ring, about twenty-five minutes from the centre by metro plus a short bus ride (the 51 from Sesto Marelli on M1 or Ponale on M5, the 87 from Centrale) or a ten-minute walk. The temporary exhibitions rotate and their quality varies considerably, but Kiefer alone justifies the journey. The spaces are enormous, flat and step-free on a single ground floor, easy with strollers or with anyone who tires on stairs, and there is a bistro with outdoor seating and an art bookshop on site. If you only have two days in Milan, put this after the Duomo and the Last Supper, not before them.