The Rainbow Quarter

Milan is a beautiful city that also knows how to surprise with its many facets and little-known places that surely deserve a visit not only by tourists but also by those who live in the city.

One such place is definitely the Rainbow Quarter on Lincoln Street and adjacent Franklin Street: a set of colors similar to a painter's palette and known as the Milanese Burano street.
In recent years this small neighborhood has been a tourist destination for modern tourists looking for unusual places to visit.

The main characteristic of this small neighborhood near the center of Milan are the small villas with its variegated colors: the pastel shades of these two-story houses with gardens, with floral decorations on the gates, the narrow passage that leaves no room for parked cars, make it an oasis of silence and beauty.

This little piece of a somewhat unconventional Milan also has a history dating back to the19th century. This neighborhood grew out of a building cooperative for workers who worked in the area. The intention was to build simple and affordable houses.
Thus, the Rainbow Neighborhood was born in the 1880s near Corso Ventidue Marzo from a brownfield site. A few years earlier the Porta Tosa railway station had been torn down, which had become useless because Milan's Central Station, which had also replaced Porta Nuova, had been built in the meantime.

In those days there was no such thing as public housing, and that of the nascent housing cooperatives was the only cheap housing solution compared to free rents, which weighed on a large part of workers' salaries with nothing left for them. The goal was simple: the sum of rents paid by a number of workers could constitute capital to build cheap houses. So they might as well put them together, in the form of cooperative shares.

Nowadays, the homes on Via Lincoln have decidedly high market prices, are exclusive, centrally located in Milan, ten minutes from the Duomo, original, each one different from the other, larger than an ordinary apartment, have private gardens, no through road. All features that raise the cost per square meter and narrow the pool of possible buyers.

To reach the Rainbow District from Milan's central station, simply take streetcar No. 9 and get off at p.zza V Giornate. From there it is a few meters walk.