Will the revival of Milan’s historic Lido also mark its end? It’s becoming a giant private fitness club

San Siro as Coney Island. Or at least that was the idea in 1931, when the Lido di Milano opened in the western part of the city, with its entrance on Piazzale Lotto: two large swimming pools, artificial rocks, diving boards, a fake pier with small boats, sandy beaches with umbrellas, bars and, just a bit further on, rides, roller coasters, and a Ferris wheel. It was not just a swimming pool, but a great public machine for sports, leisure, and summer in the city: one of Milan’s most famous open-air gyms, built around the almost impossible idea of bringing the sea where the sea was not. Ninety-five years later, what has been for generations one of the city’s most important public swimming and sports facilities is going to change radically. Closed since 2019 for redevelopment works, the Lido will reopen as a large fitness center managed by the Spanish company Ingesport, owner of the GO fit brand, under a public-private partnership with the Municipality of Milan.

The project includes a building of approximately 13,000 square meters distributed over six levels, dedicated to a gym, indoor pools, wellness areas, and sports services. What will change most of all is the historic heart of the complex: the large outdoor swimming pool will lose its bathing function and will be replaced by a new outdoor pool of about 750 square meters. According to reports by Milano Today, the monumental pool will be transformed into a scenic water feature. The paradox is all right here: the Lido will continue to be called Lido, but it will lose the very element that had built its beach identity.

After an initial period of success alternated with economic difficulties, the Lido was purchased by the Municipality of Milan in 1936 and, over the decades, it turned into one of the city’s main public sports facilities. In recent years, managed by Milanosport, it hosted a public summer swimming pool, sports fields, a toy library, and a children’s camp. Activities stopped in 2019, when the facility was closed for a redevelopment intervention that, according to initial intentions, should have been completed in 2024. In 2020 Palazzo Marino approved the public-private partnership proposal presented by Ingesport, which will invest over 26 million euros in the redevelopment of the complex, obtaining its management for the next thirty years. However, the works have accumulated several delays and the reopening is now expected by the end of 2026.

When it reopens, the Lido will retain its name and part of its historical memory, but it will have a profoundly different function from the one imagined almost a century ago. Born as a public space, designed to offer Milanese people sports, recreation, and a sort of urban holiday, it will become primarily a private fitness center: a transformation that is not an isolated case in the landscape of partnerships between the Municipality and private operators, but one that here takes on a particularly evident symbolic value. Because what is changing is not just a sports facility: it is the very idea of what a public space in the city can be today.

Featured image: Lido di Milano, a view of the entrance from Piazzale Lotto. Via Wikimedia Commons