Taliedo is a peripheral district ("

quartiere A (; plural: ) is a territorial subdivision of certain Italian towns. The word derives from (‘fourth’) and was thus properly used only for towns divided into four neighborhoods by the two main roads. It has been later used as a synonymous ...

") of the city

Milan Milan ( , , Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 million, while its metropolitan city h ...

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical re ...

, part of the Zone 4 administrative division, located south-east of the city centre. The informal boundaries of the district are three main city streets, respectively Via Mecenate, Via Bonfadini and Via Salomone. Taliedo was part of the ''

comune The (; plural: ) is a local administrative division of Italy, roughly equivalent to a township or municipality. It is the third-level administrative division of Italy, after regions ('' regioni'') and provinces (''province''). The can also ...

'' of Corpi Santi, which was annexed to Milan in 1873. The area was mostly rural until the early 20th century. The district is in fact named after a ''cascina'' (i.e., a farmhouse), "Cascina Taliedo", the major of several ''cascine'' that used to exist in the area. The urbanization of Taliedo jump started in the 1910s, when aircraft designer

Giovanni Battista Caproni Giovanni Battista Caproni, 1st Count of Taliedo (July 3, 1886 – October 27, 1957), known as "Gianni" Caproni, was an Italian aeronautical engineer, civil engineer, electrical engineer, and aircraft designer who founded the Caproni aircraft-manu ...

established a

landing strip According to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a runway is a "defined rectangular area on a land aerodrome prepared for the landing and takeoff of aircraft". Runways may be a man-made surface (often asphalt, concrete, o ...

in the area. Next came the Officine Caproni, an airplane manufacturing workshop founded by Caproni, as well as the Aerodromo d'Italia, one of the first

airports An airport is an aerodrome with extended facilities, mostly for commercial air transport. Airports usually consists of a landing area, which comprises an aerially accessible open space including at least one operationally active surface ...

in Italy and the first in the Milanese area. To allow for the construction of the airport, most ''cascine'' were demolished. A

tram A tram (called a streetcar or trolley in North America) is a rail vehicle that travels on tramway tracks on public urban streets; some include segments on segregated right-of-way. The tramlines or networks operated as public transport are ...

way was created connecting Milan and Taliedo, to be used by the workers of the Officine. The Taliedo airport was abandoned in the 1930s, and in the 1950s Officine Caproni ceased to exist. As a consequence, the district itself fell in decay. Taliedo, and the Officine Caproni, are related to one of the few traditional "ghost stories" of the Milanese folklore, reported by journalist Domenico Porzio and other sources.See Porzio (1977) According to the legend, the ghost of a man dressed in an aviator's suit used to walk by the Caproni facilities and the tramway terminus.

Footnotes

References

Domenico Porzio, ''Diavoli, fantasmi e spiriti''. In ''Guida ai misteri e segreti di Milano'', SugarCo 1977.

External links

Taliedo
(in Italian)

(in Italian) {{coord, 45, 26, 49, N, 9, 14, 54, E, source:kolossus-itwiki, display=title Districts of Milan