The village was commissioned in 1877 by Cristoforo Benigno Crespi, a textile industrialist from the province of Milan, and was built along the course of the Adda river between the municipalities of Capriate San Gervasio and Canonica, where the waterfalls allowed the movement 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, you have to travel along the chaotic and very busy A4, the highway that starts from Milan and reaches Venice, crossing the entire “northeast,” the most productive territory of Italy. Along this stressful route, you can get an idea of the massive commercial exchange that takes place daily in this rich and dynamic area. But as soon as you exit the Trezzo d’Adda highway junction, only 20 kilometers from the great Milan metropolis, as if by magic, all noise disappears, and you find yourself almost projected into another era. In these places, the atmosphere is typical of the misty Lombard province, paced by slow rhythms, where the bicycle reigns supreme and where 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 mills and power plants in this part of Lombardy. And it is precisely in this magical place that Crespi d’Adda is located.
The workers’ village develops around two main orthogonal axes, the longer of which, Corso Manzoni and Donizetti, follows the riverbank, crosses the whole village, and ends at the cemetery. Its function was to separate the factory from the houses, physically dividing the space intended for work from that for dwellings and leisure time. The other road, Viale Vittorio Emanuele II, intersects with the Corso in the center of the village and connects the beautiful factory entrance with the public park, ideally uniting the social life of the village with its productive life. The residents’ houses in the village, alternating in red and green colors, are also arranged along a regular and orthogonal street grid. The workers’ houses are often two-family detached houses, all identical and with a small garden, while the homes of employees and managers are beautiful and elegant two-story villas, near a small wood and with a large garden on all four sides. The villas were designed in the twenties, in a mixed style of Liberty, Viennese Secession, and Art Déco, by Ernesto Piròvano, an architect particularly sensitive to the medieval style and specialized in monumental projects. He also designed the Crespi family residence, an imposing villa-castle located at the entrance of the village, before the factory, and somewhat distant from all the houses. On the other side of the long road, at the end of the village, is the cemetery with the grand mausoleum of the family, which perhaps too openly reminds us 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 attitude and paternal benevolence towards their employees. In addition to offering a roof for the night, a church for Sundays, a fire station, a theater, a musical band, and a garden to avoid the temptations of the tavern, they wanted to offer all employees a new model of family: theirs. All this in the dream of a new feudalism that, however, did not last beyond the First World War.
