Marble restoration in Porta Nuova – Garibaldi

Porta Nuova is the most recent face of Milan. Around Piazza Gae Aulenti, raised above street level and ringed by towers of glass and steel, a new generation of office and residential buildings has gone up in little more than a decade. Their interiors share a clear vocabulary: double-height entrances with a concierge desk, bright corridors and apartments where marble runs continuously from the living room into the bathroom.

The stones we meet most often in this setting are veined whites such as Calacatta and Statuario, soft greys, filled travertines and darker marbles used as accents on worktops and wall cladding. They are laid in generous slabs, sometimes over underfloor heating, with joints kept to a minimum. When the surface wears, it cannot simply be “gone over”: the original flatness, the available thickness and the continuity of the veining across slabs all have to be respected.

Walk a few minutes south, though, and the century changes. Corso Garibaldi and the streets leading towards Brera keep their late nineteenth-century houses, courtyard buildings and twentieth-century blocks with stone staircases and smaller entrance halls. There we find Botticino, Ceppo and terrazzo, with treads hollowed in the middle by generations of footsteps. In a single round of visits we may assess a recent Calacatta slab and an early twentieth-century staircase, two jobs that call for different machines, abrasives and timings.