Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

The gardens develop partly on the eastern road axis consisting of Corso Concordia, Corso Indipendenza, Corso Plebisciti and Viale Argonne; formed with the urban development of the city and materialized with the implementation of the first regulatory plans.

In fact, with the first Master Plan drawn up by the engineer Cesare Beruto (approved in 1889), attention was paid to the problems of urban morphology, thanks to the organization of the road grid according to a hierarchy of main axes, secondary routes and the use of spaces of tree-lined avenues, gardens and squares as ordering elements of the urban layout.

Beruto draws the road axis as a closed structure that starts from an open space in Porta Monforte and develops with a sequence of green spaces and tree-lined rows like a promenade arranged between two squares: Piazza Risorgimento and Piazzale Dateo.

This solution will remain substantially unchanged until today with the inclusion in 1956 of the fountain and the monument to Pinocchio, of the more recent cycle path alongside the gardens which can be traveled in both directions and protected from road traffic with a fence; and some spaces intended for play areas and sports practice.

Near via Ciro Menotti, which cuts across the gardens, there is a fountain with a monument to the puppet Pinocchio, protagonist of the famous children's novel "The Adventures of Pinocchio. Story of a Puppet" by Carlo Lorenzini known as Collodi.

The bronze statue, a work from 1955 by Attilio Fagioli (1877-1966), was donated to the city of Milan by the "Artistic Family", with solemn inauguration on 19 May 1956. The local newspapers gave much prominence to the work which with pride parochial was advertised as "the Pinocchio of the Madonnina" underlining how the character represented by Fagioli was very different and more realistic than the one created by the sculptor Emilio Greco for the town of Collodi. The work, cast at the Battaglia artistic foundry, portrays Pinocchio as a child observing the inanimate body of the puppet he was. On the sides of the base the Cat and the Fox are depicted.

In the centre, in the pillar that supports Pinocchio, a phrase by the poet Antonio Negri is inscribed which inspired the sculptor's work: "How funny I was when I was a puppet! And you who look at me, are very sure that you have tamed the puppet that lives in you?". The sculptural group suffered various damages over time and Fagioli himself, very fond of this which was one of his last works, worked on its restoration several times. The subsequent and prolonged state of neglect in which the sculpture found itself was the subject of a parliamentary question by Delmastro Delle Vedove to the Minister for Cultural Heritage and Activities in September 2004. The work was in fact visibly damaged by vandalism: the Cat had been stolen and only paw prints remained; Pinocchio's nose had been broken. Furthermore, the fountain had been inactive for some time. Some people in recent years had mobilized to restore the fountain to its original conditions, including Sandra Tofanari, granddaughter of the statue's author, who offered to personally carry out the restoration.

The sculpture, restored to its original conditions, was inaugurated again after the restoration on 18 December 2013. In 2016 the gardens were named after the journalist and partisan commander Italo Pietra (1911-1991)

Tree species

• hackberry (Celtis australis)
• Atlas cedar (Cedrus atlantica)
• Himalayan cedar (Cedrus deodara)
• horse chestnuts (Aesculus hippocastanum)
• evergreen magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora)
• blackcurrant (Ribes spp.), lime (Tilia spp.)
• local lime tree (Tilia platyphyllos)
• wild lime (Tilia cordata)

Shrub species

• hornbeam (Carpinus betulus)
• hazelnut (Corylus avellana)
• pittosporum (Pittosporum tobira)

Water and surroundings

There is a fountain with a monument dedicated to Pinocchio