Ex Centro Controllo RAI

Hidden by vegetation, on Mirabellino Street, is the former RAI Control Center headquarters - Rai Way to be precise. Its purpose was to carry out controls on the radio waves coming from the broadcasting headquarters.

The building, designed in 1950 in the rationalist style and with avant-garde technical-scientific criteria by architect Gio Ponti, already the author of the Pirelli skyscraper in Milan, has a curvilinear plan that is meant to recall the shape of a satellite dish, and was intended to house the control equipment.

In the rear part that is almost meant to contrast with the curved lines of the forepart, there is a square building that then housed the lodgings of the janitor and the engineer-director in charge of the plant, later used as canteen rooms.

The former Rai Way headquarters preserves some original furnishings of great interest inside, a small world of great suggestion.

The former RAI Control Center in the Park, was built to replace the plant in Sesto Calende. It was 1929 when, a few years after the birth of Italian Radio, a first "Control Laboratory" was built, the one in Sesto Calende to be exact, for the verification of radio signals and transmissions.

But, in the 1950s, a few months after the start of regular television broadcasts in Italy, it became necessary to build a new center, equipped with state-of-the-art equipment. And the site chosen was Monza Park, which provided the "electromagnetic quiet" necessary for measurements.

Thus born with radio, and transformed with television, the Rai Control Center in the park has been active until 2018.