The village was commissioned in 1877 by Cristoforo Benigno Crespi, a textile industrialist from the province of Milan, and was built along the Adda river between the municipalities of Capriate San Gervasio and Canonica, where the waterfalls allowed the operation of the looms and the production of energy. Crespi d’Adda is considered the most important example of a workers’ village in Italy, both for its perfect state of preservation and for the exemplary nature of its urban planning, so much so that in 1995 it was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.
To reach Crespi d’Adda, one must travel the chaotic and heavily trafficked A4 motorway, which starts in Milan and reaches Venice, crossing the entire “Northeast,” the most productive area of Italy. Along this stressful route, one can get an idea of the massive commercial exchange that takes place daily in this rich and dynamic region. But as soon as you exit at the Trezzo d’Adda motorway junction, only 20 kilometers from the great Milan metropolis, as if by magic, all noise disappears and you find yourself transported almost to another era. In these places, the atmosphere is typical of the foggy Lombard province, paced by slow rhythms, where bicycles reign supreme and everyone lives their existence in close contact with a beautiful nature made of woods, hills, and silence.
The calm waters of the Naviglio della Martesana, built in the 15th century to irrigate the fields with the waters of the Adda, flow slowly and feed the mills and power plants of this part of Lombardy. And it is in this magical place that Crespi d’Adda lies.
The workers’ village develops around two main orthogonal axes, the longer one, Corso Manzoni and Donizetti, follows the riverbank, crosses the entire village, and ends at the cemetery. Its function was to separate the factory from the houses, thus physically dividing the space intended for work from that for housing and leisure. The other road, Viale Vittorio Emanuele II, intersects with Corso in the center of the village, connecting the beautiful factory entrance with the public park, thus ideally linking the social life of the town with its productive life. The residents’ houses in the village, alternated in red and green colors, are also arranged along a regular orthogonal grid of streets. The workers’ homes are often two-family villas, all identical and with a small garden-plot, while the houses of the clerks and managers are beautiful and elegant two-story villas, close to a small wood and with a large garden on all four sides. The villas were designed in the 1920s in a mixed style of Liberty, Viennese Secession, and Art Déco by Ernesto Piròvano, an architect particularly sensitive to medieval style and specialized in monumental projects. He also designed the Crespi family residence, an imposing villa-castle located at the entrance of the town, before the factory and somewhat distant from all the houses. On the other side of the long road, at the end of the village, there is the cemetery with the grand mausoleum of the family, which reminds us, perhaps too openly, of the solid hierarchy that prevailed in Crespi d’Adda, in life as in death.
Many other industrialists of the time followed the example of Cristoforo Benigno Crespi and built workers’ villages, adopting a humanitarian and fatherly benevolent attitude towards their employees. Beyond offering a roof for the night, a church for Sunday, the fire station, the theater, the marching band, and a garden to avoid the temptations of the tavern, they wanted to propose to all employees also a new model of family: their own. All this in the dream of a new feudalism that, however, did not last beyond the First World War.
