Every year, during Design Week, Milan turns into a living, breathing organism. Events multiply like frenzied cells, installations spill into courtyards and palazzos, and encounters crisscross in unpredictable ways. Fuorisalone is a wild, tentacled creature. It can’t be contained, explained, or tamed. But it can be followed — affectionately, curiously, open to surprise.

There is something deeply personal in how each of us experiences this week. Some collect invitations, some get wonderfully lost among the districts, some find beauty in a fleeting detail. I follow the trail of desire: both the familiar — the things that have thrilled me for years — and the unexpected, which catches me off guard like a sudden revelation. Fuorisalone is also this: a play of echoes, of mysterious attractions, of accidental encounters that somehow leave a mark.

So here it is — without pretending to be exhaustive but with plenty of passion — a personal, thematic itinerary through some of the projects already making my heart beat faster. The rest, as always, will be left to chance — and to the irresistible urge to get lost.

1. Porta Venezia Design District – No Boundaries Design
different venues
7-13 April 2025, opening hours vary

Design as an act of freedom, as a practice that rejects strict definitions and rigid disciplines. Porta Venezia becomes a fluid territory where doubt itself is the creative engine. Highlights include: Toiletpaper’s irreverent and surreal intervention at the Bastioni; Vanadio23’s intimate and unsettling ceramics; WonderGlass & Calico Wallpaper’s Poetica, which turns light into memory at the Institute for the Blind; and the surprising exhibition by 6:AM in the old Cozzi swimming pool changing rooms — a space reborn as a sensory threshold between body and city.

2. We Will Design at BASE Milano
BASE Milano, Via Bergognone 34
7-13 April 2025, opening hours vary

A living, breathing lab. This year’s theme, Making Kin, is inspired by Donna Haraway. Between speculative installations, urban campsites, temporary residencies, and choreographed performances, BASE remains one of the boldest strongholds of Fuorisalone. Here, design meets philosophy, biopolitics, and utopia. A place not just to visit — but to stay, and think.

3. Opposites United at Museo Permanente Museum
Permanente Museum, Via Filippo Turati 34 
7-13 April 2025, opening hours vary

A museum that becomes a festival, thanks to Kia and ZERO. Interdisciplinary talks, adaptive installations, and live sets explore perception and form. The works of Philippe Parreno and A.A. Murakami are pure magic — playing with time, vapor, light, and presence. A suspended experience where technology and poetry blend, and the invisible comes to life.

4. Artemest, L’Appartamento at Palazzo Donizetti
Palazzo Donizetti, Via Gaetano Donizetti 48
8-13 April 2025, h. 10 AM-7 PM

Italian craftsmanship and international design studios come together to transform a 19th-century palazzo into an ideal home, where each room offers a different world view. Not just a display, but a layered, intimate story where beauty weaves into gesture, material, and the poetry of everyday living.

5. Gaetano Pesce – A Party for Architecture
Antonia Jannone Disegni di Architettura, Corso Garibaldi 125
8-13 April 2025, h. 10.30 AM-8 PM

A year after his passing, one of the most visionary masters of our time returns to Galleria Antonia Jannone, bringing his radical ideas back to life. A Party for Architecture is more than a show: it’s a tribute to design as a political, poetic, revolutionary act. Co-produced with Studio Gaetano Pesce New York and Contemplazioni, it gathers models, drawings, and handwritten notes tracing the path of a mind that never accepted conformity. Pesce didn’t design objects or buildings — he drew freedom.

6. Cassina & Formafantasma – Staging Modernity
Teatro Lirico Giorgio Gaber, Via Larga 14 
8-13 April 2025, h. 10.30 AM-7.30 PM

At Teatro Lirico Giorgio Gaber, Formafantasma literally stages a reflection on modernity and its ghosts. This is not just an installation, but a full performance directed by Fabio Cherstich, with contributions from Emanuele Coccia, Andrés Jaque, and Feifei Zhou (terriStories). Celebrating the 60th anniversary of Cassina’s Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand® Collection — but doing so with a critical, poetic edge. Modernism is not idolized, but questioned, opening the door to wilder, more ecological, vital visions.

7. Google – Making the Invisible Visible
Garage 21, Via Archimede 26
8-13 April 2025, h. 9.30 AM-5.30 PM

At Garage 21, Lachlan Turczan sculpts spaces made of light, reacting to the presence of visitors. Design as alchemy: thought becoming matter, the invisible revealing itself through interaction. A near-hypnotic experience where perception and technology fuse into one.

8. Miu Miu Literary Club
Circolo Filologico Milanese, Via Calerici 10
9-10 April 2025, opening hours vary

In the suspended quiet of the Circolo Filologico, time slows down. A tribute to girlhood and forgotten women’s literature, with Simone de Beauvoir and Fumiko Enchi as ideal patrons. A space for reading, listening, remembering. Where design is transformed into words, gestures, whispers.

9. Gucci | Bamboo Encounters
Chiostri di San Simpliciano, Piazza Paolo VI, 6
8-13 April 2025, h. 10 AM-8 PM

In the cloisters of San Simpliciano, bamboo is reimagined by seven contemporary designers. Not as decorative exoticism, but as a material of resistance, transformation, and vision. A poetic journey through sustainability, memory, and form.

10. Saint Laurent – Charlotte Perriand
Padiglione Visconti, Via Tortona 58
8-13 April 2025, h. 11 AM-7 PM

An intimate and powerful tribute. Four rare pieces by Perriand, long hidden from view, are finally revealed. More than a celebration, this is a declaration: design is always biography, choice, affirmation. A rigorous, meditative homage.

11. MoscaPartners – Variations 2025 at Palazzo Litta
Palazzo Litta, Corso Magenta 24
7-13 April 2025, h. 10 AM-8 PM

Design as a journey — physical, cultural, emotional. Byoung Soo Cho’s site-specific installation transforms the courtyard into a suspended platform, a painted forest, a collection of imperfect ceramics like a breath. In the historical rooms, designers from Bangladesh, Lithuania, Japan, Canada and beyond narrate their worlds. Every room is a story, every object a trajectory. A necessary, surprising, collective event.

12. Maison Perrier-Jouët x Formafantasma – Cohabitare
Chiostro della Chiesa di San Marco 
8-13 April 2025, opening hours vary

In the cloisters of San Marco, an installation celebrates the biodiversity of the Champagne region. Terracotta, plants, pollinators: design as an ally of nature. A poetic, activist gesture reminding us that every ecosystem is a fragile choreography of relationships.

13. MUJI – House Manifesto
Corso Garibaldi 89A, Via Tommaso da Cazzaniga, Giardino Pippa Bacca
8-13 April 2025, h. 10 AM-8 PM

In the Pippa Bacca garden, a modular pavilion inspired by Japanese architecture. Quiet, efficient, sustainable. An oasis amidst the chaos of Milan, where minimalism offers refuge and the promise of balance. Inside, even the air feels different.

14. Portanuova – Vertical Connection
Piazza Gae Aulenti, 12 
8-13 April 2025, h. 10 AM-9 PM

A suspended walk through urban greenery, with AI responding to sounds, lights, and images. A project by Evastomper with scientific input from Stefano Mancuso: a vegetal and cybernetic symphony. Here, walking feels like breathing with the landscape.

15. Eataly – The Garden of Wonders by Elena Salmistraro
Piazza XXV Aprile 10
7-3 April 2025, h. 8.30 AM-11 PM

A spiral of colors, plants, and dreams. From the ground floor to the restaurant, a crescendo of forms and hues — a garden dreaming of becoming a fairy tale. Every corner holds a spark of wonder.

16. Alcova 2025 – Four Sites, One Design Path
Villa Bagatti Valsecchi, Serre di Pasino, ex fabbrica SNIA, Villa Borsani, Varedo
7-13 April 2025, h. 11 AM-7 PM

Alcova returns, and with force. In Varedo, across Villa Borsani, Villa Bagatti Valsecchi, the Pasino Greenhouses, and the former SNIA factory, an atlas of radical visions takes shape. Between industrial ruins and secret gardens: Ghost Orchids by Marcin Rusak, Soft Horizons, Under the Volcano by Ranieri, inflatable hammams, the strange creatures of Atelier dell’Errore, live 3D-printed objects. Each site has its own soul, every project its urgency. And then: Noritake, Objects of Common Interest, Completedworks, ANANASANANAS, Supaform, Studio Noké, Rive Roshan, The Library Show, Monstruosus x Anastassiades. Alcova is not an event — it’s an ecosystem. It is the future trying to take shape.

17. Do Something, Change Everything by IKEA
Via Vigevano 18
7-13 April 2025, opening hours vary

At IKEA HQ, the democracy of design meets the responsibility of living. Do Something. Change Everything. is both a motto and a call to action. Talks, workshops, music, and small daily actions that, collectively, change everything. The new Stockholm collection is presented as a catalogue of sustainable, accessible, desirable possibilities.

18. Marimekko x Laila Gohar
Teatro Litta - Manifatture teatrali, Corso Magenta 24 
7-13 April 2025, opening hours vary

A theatrical bedroom inside a real theater. Laila Gohar interprets Marimekko’s playful language with a collection inspired by childhood and the longing for rest. A surreal domestic installation where food meets textiles and dreams become scenography. Design as comfort, play, and a love letter.

19. Issey Miyake – TYPE-XIII
Issey Miyake, Via Bagutta 12
8-13 April 2025, opening hours vary

Between metal and fabric, light and volume, Atelier Oï creates for A-POC ABLE Issey Miyake a luminous sculpture to be worn — or inhabited. A poetic, ambiguous object that slips between body and space, garment and lamp. A quiet manifesto of lightness.

20. Grand Seiko x Tokujin Yoshioka – Frozen
Palazzo Landriani, Via Borgonuovo 25 | Via Fiori Scuri 4 
8-13 April, h. 11 AM-9 PM

At Palazzo Landriani, a luminous piece that tells time with the delicacy of a snowflake — still, yet ever-changing. Tokujin Yoshioka captures the ephemeral using solid materials, as if light itself could become ice. A watch, yes. But also a crystal of frozen emotion.

21. Rossana Orlandi – RoCollectible
Galleria Rossana Orlandi, Via Matteo Bandello, 14 
7-13 April 2025, h. 9 AM-8 PM

At Via Matteo Bandello, Yong Nam Kim’s solo show presents furniture turned sculpture, rooted in Korean tradition but open to contemporary dialogues. A meeting of spirituality and function, matter and gesture. As always, Rossana Orlandi is the compass for those seeking design that hums beneath the surface.

22. Capsule Plaza – Spazio Maiocchi & beyond
Spazio Maiocchi + other venues 
7-13 April 2025, h. 10 AM-8 PM

From Max Lamb to Sabine Marcelis, from Faye Toogood to Stone Island — a global concentration of aesthetics and research. With multiple venues and a packed program of talks, listening sessions, and immersive installations, Capsule Plaza is a festival within the festival. Here, design merges with music, fashion, and visual culture. Everything happens. And it happens now.

23. Vico e Campeggi alla Torre
Torre al Parco, Via Giuseppe Revere 2/4
7-13 April 2025, h. 10.30 AM-6.30 PM

A tribute to Vico Magistretti and his friendship with Claudio Campeggi. Inside the tower Magistretti designed, the first five pieces of a collection that looks to the future through the lens of memory. A project that moves you: telling not just a story of design, but one of friendship, exchange, and shared invention.

Some places don’t just host design — they question it. They use it as a lens to read the present, to challenge the rules, to imagine other ways of living and thinking. These projects don’t just aim to please. They aim to stir. They aim to shift something inside you.

24. Dropcity – Prison Times
Via Sammartini 40
3 April - 31 May, opening hours vary

At the Magazzini Raccordati, Dropcity tackles prison environments with Prison Times – Spatial Dynamics of Penal Environments. Five tunnels, a thousand square meters, objects sourced from prisons around the world. The exhibition is clinical, taxonomic, disarming. No aestheticization of pain, but a lucid, necessary gaze on the global prison system. Design here becomes a tool for analysis, rupture, and awareness.

25. House of Switzerland Milano
Casa degli Artisti, Corso Garibaldi 89/A, Via Tommaso da Cazzaniga
7-13 April 2025, h. 10 AM-8 PM

In its third edition, House of Switzerland celebrates collaboration as a political act. In a divided world, building together is already revolutionary. Between craftsmanship and research, independent design and institutions, Switzerland presents itself as a platform for dialogue. Design here becomes alliance, listening, convergence. An exhibition that says no to ego — and yes to the collective.

26. Prada Frames – In Transit
Padiglione Reale and Treno Arlecchino, Stazione Centrale in Milan
6-7-8 April 2025, opening hours vary

Curated by Formafantasma, Prada Frames really moves this year: aboard the Arlecchino train and inside the Royal Pavilion of Milan Central Station. A collective reflection on infrastructure as an invisible, yet essential landscape. A lab of ideas crossing ecology, politics, mobility. More than an event, a thought on the move — where design becomes the geography of thought.

The beauty of Fuorisalone is that it never really ends. Every object seen, every place crossed, every word heard settles inside you, working away, resurfacing when you least expect it. I know I will only catch a fragment. And those I meet will almost always have seen something rarer, more beautiful, more surprising. But that’s the real point of Fuorisalone: an emotional, ever-changing map, made of personal discoveries, accidental paths, and partial visions. There may not be a “right” way to experience it — there is only your way. I will keep searching — slowly, without a map, heart wide open. Because, in the end, the most powerful design is the one that changes us. Even just a little.

Opening image: Charlotte Perriand, Canapé de la Résidence de l'Ambassadeur du Japon. Courtesy Charlotte Perriand and Saint Laurent