By Julia Buckley, CNN
Milan, Italy (CNN) — With its monumental façade, ornated with Roman-style columns, pedestals, and huge statues — naked men, winged horses, lions’ heads and gargoyles, for starters — Milan’s main train station is a tourist sight in its own right. This is a city that doesn’t do things by halves — the city’s iconic Duomo is Italy’s largest cathedral. But the station goes one further — it’s one of the largest in Europe.
Breathtaking from the outside, it’s no less spectacular inside. Travelers walk in through monumental entrances on three sides to an interior where vast staircases sweep upstairs to the departures hall with its mosaic flooring and sculpted walls. Trains depart from the 21 platforms that make up the main area of this magnificent station, which opened in 1931.
It’s bombastic and stylish — and was the perfect introduction to the 2026 Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics earlier this year. “L’emozione di essere italiani” declared posters all over the station — “the thrill of being Italian.” The phrase was even projected in green, red and white lights — the colors of the Italian flag — on the façade.
Yet the building also represents another, less spectacular part of Italy — its fascist history.
Not only is the station one of the most famous buildings in the country to be completed during fascism — while designed in a previous period, it was “tweaked” to add symbols of Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship, which are still visible — but beneath the main passenger facilities lies a concealed platform that was used for horrifying purposes during World War II.
Hidden for generations, Binario 21 — Platform 21 — is the underground area from which the Nazi occupiers and fascist sympathizers dispatched Jews and political opponents to World War II death camps.
Originally built as a space to transport goods, the area’s horrifying wartime use was hushed up for decades. It was only in 1994 that researchers realized what it was.
Even today, the more than 320,000 passengers who pass through the Stazione Centrale each day have little idea of its shocking history.
Today, the space has been turned into the Memoriale della Shoah di Milano, the city’s Holocaust memorial. Visitors can walk along the secret platforms, go inside the freight carriages that the fascists repurposed for human transportation, and see vivid testimony from Holocaust survivors. All while the screech of brakes and rumble of trains on the tracks pass overhead this dark underground space.
A symbol of the regime
When Milano Centrale opened in 1931, it was during a powerful period for Mussolini. Italy’s fascist dictator had swept to power in 1922, and was increasingly popular. “By 1931 the regime was very consolidated,” says Vanda Wilcox, an adjunct professor of modern European history at John Cabot University.
The station’s construction had began in 1912, when architect Ulisse Stacchini won a competition with his design. He planned a monolithic entrance whose vast spaces and soaring ceilings were said to be inspired by ancient Roman and Egyptian architecture, then added elements of Art Deco, Liberty style (Italy’s answer to Art Nouveau), and frescoes of the cities of the relatively new Italian state.
As the regime took over the build, fascist touches were added such as sculpting fasces — bundles of rods that had symbolized authority in ancient Rome, and the root of the word fascism — on the façade. The symbol of transport, travel and freedom, had been given a fascist tone.
A secret underground space
While Stacchini’s stylistic vision was perfected in the public areas and the platforms upstairs, down below he built an area for the transport of the mail. Milan’s main post office was on a side street, and goods leaving Milan were taken across the road