BAM - Biblioteca degli Alberi Milano
Open-air botanical park with over one hundred tree species arranged in circular groves like a living library.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Biblioteca degli Alberi in Milan starts with what this ground behind the rail yards was for decades after the Second World War: a bare, polluted brownfield used for dumped building materials and a traveling circus. It follows Dutch landscape architect Petra Blaisse, who won an international competition in 2004 with an idea nobody had tried here, organizing a public park like a library, with each tree species gathered into its own circular grove instead of a shelf. Look for the twenty-two groves as you walk between them, and notice that Blaisse insisted her library of trees have no gates and no closing time.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Brera Botanical Garden
Walled eighteenth-century botanical garden of medicinal herbs, centuries-old ginkgo trees and elliptical ponds.
Bosco Verticale
Twin towers wrapped in real trees, tended by rope-access arborists high above the street.
CityLife
Car-free district of parkland and three architect-designed skyscrapers on a former trade-fair site.
Pirelli Hangar Bicocca
Vast former locomotive factory turned free contemporary art space, home to a permanent forest of concrete towers.
Giardini della Guastalla
Formal Italian-style garden centered on a Baroque fishpond, founded by a Renaissance countess for a charity school.
Leonardo da Vinci's Vineyard
Renaissance vineyard given to a painter by a duke, replanted from DNA-matched roots after five centuries.