Isola

This guide to the Isola neighborhood in Milan opens on Liberation Day 2007, when diggers rather than a parade arrived to tear down the Stecca degli Artigiani, a former workshop building on the site of today's glass towers. It traces the district's name back to 1865, when the railway physically cut it off from the rest of Milan, and follows the factory workers, later artists, sculptors, and committees who filled these streets for over a century. Listen for how a Brown Boveri electrical works shaped the neighborhood's identity long before any artist moved in.