Italy · Lombardia · Milan
Isola, Milan — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Isola is a quarter of Milan north of Porta Garibaldi, grown from a roadside borgo of the early 19th century and cut off from the city by the railway.
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Where to stay in Isola
Where the beds are, and what that means for the visit.
The railway made it an island. Building the yards that now serve the Garibaldi station cut across the old Comasina road from the middle of the 19th century, which left the borgo in two halves, the southern one nearer the centre of Milan and the northern one beyond the tracks. The name now means only the northern half.
The city gave the label Isola to that part alone when it drew up its Nuclei di Identità Locale, and the southern half went into a different one with the ground where the west wing of the first Milan Centrale of 1864 once stood. Via Borsieri is the spine.
Things to do in and around Milan
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Churches & Religious Sites
8- Santa Maria delle Grazie UNESCO
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Castles & Historic Sites
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worth knowingacross 3 categories in and around Milan
About Isola
What are the main landmarks in Isola?
The gate is the reference point. Porta Garibaldi was called Porta Comasina until 1860, when the people of Milan renamed it for Giuseppe Garibaldi, who commanded the Cacciatori delle Alpi and won at Varese and San Fermo on the way to freeing the city from Austrian rule. The old road survives under new names.
From 1878 the Comasina road as far as the station became the corso Como, and beyond the station, running north toward Como, it is via Borsieri continued by via Thaon di Revel. The rest is the borgo itself. It is a linear settlement, laid along the road at the expense of the fields it went through, which is why the fabric here is narrow and long rather than gridded.
What is the history of Isola?
This was outside the gate. The borgo developed from the early 19th century in the Comune dei Corpi Santi, along both sides of the old Comasina road, taking ground from the countryside that had been there. The railway broke it in half.
From the middle of the century the yards that now feed the Garibaldi station were laid across the road, and the borgo was left as a southern part nearer the centre and a northern part beyond the tracks. The names changed with it. The gate became Porta Garibaldi in 1860 in gratitude to Giuseppe Garibaldi, and from 1878 the road took the names corso Como, via Borsieri and via Thaon di Revel that it still carries.
Boundaries were never official here. Milanesi once used Isola loosely for the whole area north of Porta Garibaldi, the ponte delle Gabelle and Porta Nuova, and only the recent division of the city into eighty-eight Nuclei di Identità Locale drew a line, keeping the name for the northern part alone.
Where is Isola?
Isola lies north of Porta Garibaldi in the Municipio 9 of Milan, beyond the railway yards of the Garibaldi station, with via Borsieri and via Thaon di Revel running north through it toward Como.
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Updated October 2026