NoLo, NaPa, SouPra, NOM: over the past two decades, Milan has redrawn its urban map by turning peripheral and semi-central districts into new cultural hubs. In the process, the city has also invented a language of acronyms and abbreviations functioning almost like place brands — easy to remember, instantly shareable, and perfectly suited to social media and real estate narratives.

The latest acronym to join this parallel geography is NoCe, short for “North of Cenisio,” the area stretching from the Monumental Cemetery to the Ghisolfa overpass, encompassing Bullona, Simonetta, and part of the former Farini rail yard district. The name was coined by Alessandra Dal Monte, journalist for Corriere della Sera, who also curates the neighborhood’s dedicated Instagram page. The idea emerged in 2022 after she moved from Chinatown to this part of the city, where — she says — it was still possible to spend a distinctly “Milanese” day moving between historic cafés, markets, galleries, and local neighborhood institutions.

Increasingly in Milan, neighborhoods are built through storytelling as much as through urban planning. Often, the narrative comes before the physical transformation itself. It happened with NoLo, which in just a few years became an international case study in grassroots urban regeneration, and the same dynamic now seems to be unfolding in this northwestern corner of the city. Much like NoLo before its full gentrification, NoCe appeals because it still feels more like a promise of the future than a fully completed district.

Everything begins with Milan’s Monumental Cemetery, widely considered one of the city’s most extraordinary open-air museums. Its tombs, chapels, and mausoleums were commissioned from leading architects and sculptors between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Bbpr to Lucio Fontana. This is close to — but not yet inside — Chinatown. A little farther north, railway viaducts, tracks, and industrial sheds begin to dominate the landscape around Scalo Farini, the former nineteenth-century freight yard that is now one of Milan’s largest urban redevelopment sites.

Between Via Messina, Via Stilicone, and the Ghisolfa area, a more industrial and unresolved Milan still survives: workshops, railway depots, artisan courtyards, and converted warehouses that in recent years have started attracting design showrooms, creative studios, and exhibition spaces. Some of the district’s most important cultural addresses are located here, including Galleria Lia Rumma, housed inside a former industrial building on Via Stilicone transformed into an exhibition venue. Slightly farther west is Galleria Cortina, founded by Renzo Cortina in 1960 on Via Mac Mahon and among the first Milan galleries to introduce artists such as Bruno Munari and Maria Mulas to the city.

Villa Simonetta — a fifteenth-century Renaissance villa that over the centuries served as an aristocratic residence, military barracks, and hospital — is now home to the Civica Scuola di Musica Claudio Abbado and remains one of the neighborhood’s most evocative historic landmarks. A little farther south, in Piazza Diocleziano, the Museum of the Water Plant recently opened inside a still-functioning 1906 pumping station. Through pumps, turbines, and industrial machinery, it tells the story of Milan’s water infrastructure and is the city’s first museum housed inside an operational water facility.

Then there are the neighborhood cafés and markets: Delfico, open since 1917 and still largely unchanged, with its Formica counter and one-euro espresso, and the Via Fauché market, one of the last traditional Milanese street markets still deeply tied to local daily life. Natural wine bars, small bistros, and listening bars are already beginning to appear between Via Cenisio and Via Govone, often inside former hardware stores and old neighborhood shops. Among the newest openings is LOM Dopolavoro, a former urban farmhouse behind the Monumental Cemetery that has been transformed into a cultural space, restaurant, and shared garden.

Opening image: The Piazzale of Milan's Monumental Cemetery. Photo Giorgio Sannino via Unsplash