The back story
Wild Milan: a Vertical Forest and the Ticino Valley
Trees and birds on the balconies of the Bosco Verticale, wide city parks, and the river forests of the Ticino valley just outside Milan: the green side of a city of design.
Photo Credit
Image courtesy of © LFM2182 · CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia CommonsThe natural side of Milan, from the planted towers of the Bosco Verticale and the city's parks to the Parco Nord and the Parco del Ticino, Italy's first regional park, where more than 300 bird species have been recorded, with a directory of the green places in our guide.
Milan is a city of fashion, finance and design, and few come here for its wildlife. Yet the city has planted a forest on its skyline, its parks are full of birds, and less than an hour away the Ticino flows through one of the great river parks of Italy.
This is a short, honest guide to Milan's natural side: what to see in town, and where to go when you want river, woods and birds. The parks are best early in the morning; for the Ticino, give it a day.
Milan's most famous forest grows on the balconies of two towers.
A forest in the sky
In Porta Nuova, Stefano Boeri's Bosco Verticale, two residential towers of 110 and 76 metres, carries some 800 trees, 4,500 shrubs and 20,000 plants of about a hundred species on its balconies, placed according to how much sun each face receives. Its architects call it a home for trees and birds that also houses humans. The best view is from the Biblioteca degli Alberi park at its foot.
Photo Credit
Image courtesy of © Daniel Case · CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia CommonsThe city parks
Parco Sempione, behind the Castello Sforzesco, and the Giardini Indro Montanelli by Porta Venezia, home of the Natural History Museum, are the green lungs of the centre, with ponds and old trees. On the northern edge of the city, the Parco Nord Milano is far wilder: some 600 hectares of woods, meadows and avenues, a stopping point for birds moving across the plain.
Photo Credit
Image courtesy of © Maria Rita Gelso · CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia CommonsFeature: the Ticino valley
West of Milan, the Ticino runs south from Lake Maggiore to the Po through the Parco Lombardo della Valle del Ticino, about 91,000 hectares of river, woods, wetlands and rice fields, recognised by UNESCO as a Biosphere Reserve. The park's own bird atlas records more than 300 species, among them bitterns and little bitterns that breed in the rice fields, black-winged stilts, goshawks and white storks.
Did you know? The Ticino park, founded in 1974, was the first regional park in Italy, and 320 bird species have been recorded within it: more than six in ten of all the species known in Italy.
Our advice
Our advice: walk the Parco Sempione or the BAM before the city wakes, and look up at the Bosco Verticale from the park. For the Ticino, take the train towards Pavia or Vigevano and walk or cycle along the river, with water and insect repellent in summer. Never feed the birds in the city parks.
Why it's on our list
- A forest in the sky
- The city parks
- Feature: the Ticino valley
- Our advice
Location
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