The village was founded 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 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 the chaotic and very busy A4, the highway that starts from Milan and arrives in Venice, crossing the entire “northeast,” the most productive area of Italy. Along this stressful journey, one 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, just 20 kilometers from the great Milan metropolis, as if by magic every 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 beautiful nature made up of woods, hills, and silence.
The calm waters of the Martesana Canal, 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 precisely in this magical place that Crespi d’Adda is located.
The workers’ village develops around two main perpendicular axes, the longer of which, 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 homes 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, thus ideally joining the social life of the village with its productive life. The houses of the village inhabitants, alternated in red and green colors, are also arranged along a regular and orthogonal grid of streets. The workers’ houses are often semi-detached villas, all identical and with a small vegetable garden, while the dwellings of employees 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 twenties, in a mixed style of Art Nouveau, Vienna Secession, and Art Déco, by Ernesto Piròvano, an architect particularly sensitive to the medieval style and specialized in monumental-type projects. He also designed the residence of the Crespi family, 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 reminds us, perhaps a bit 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 created workers’ villages, adopting a humanitarian attitude and paternal benevolence towards their employees. Besides offering a roof for the night, a church for Sundays, a fire station, a theater, a music band, and a garden to avoid the temptations of the tavern, they wanted to propose to 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.
