A New Book Celebrating the Secret Beauty of Milan

Having just gotten back from Milan, where the foyer of our Airbnb apartment building looked like this, the subject of a new book from Taschen hits awfully close to home: Called Entryways of Milan, the book takes readers inside the heavy wooden doors that often conceal the city’s most beautiful thresholds, or ingressi. Milan has always had a misplaced reputation as “the ugly city;” the book’s author, who grew up in reconstruction-era Berlin, even refers to it as a place whose “allure is not as effervescent as that of Paris, nor as ancient as that of Rome.” But anyone who has spent time traversing Milan’s streets and ducking inside its courtyards knows that reputation to be false. This book celebrate’s 144 of the city’s most spectacular foyers built between 1920 and 1970, often home to architectural elements and furniture by legendary designers like Gio Ponti, Aldo Rossi, and Piero Portaluppi as well as the most fantastic array of marbles Italy’s quarries have to offer. We’ve picked 10 of our favorites here. Head on over to Taschen to buy the book, which comes out in America May 15.