Every design for Sesto San Giovanni

The name tells you where you are: Sesto marks the sixth Roman mile on the old road from Milan to Monza, and San Giovanni the town's tie to the basilica in Monza. For centuries it was little more than a cluster of farmhouses. Then came Falck, Campari, Magneti Marelli and Breda, and Sesto became one of Italy's great industrial towns.

Pirelli HangarBicocca and the Galleria Campari carry two of the great industrial names into the present. Elsewhere the past is more matter-of-fact: the Locomotiva Breda 830.017 on display, the Monumento alla Resistenza, and the wide former industrial areas east of the railway. Its strong communist tradition and wartime strikes earned it the nickname "Stalingrad of Italy". Sesto is joined to Milan with no gap at all, and everyday life runs on that link: the commute, and the offices of firms such as ABB and Oracle that replaced the steelworks.

Grow up here and the map is your memory of factory gates turned into galleries, of the Lambro along the eastern edge, and of streets your grandparents walked to the shift.