Crespi: a Unesco World Heritage Jewel

Crespi d’Adda is located 18 kilometres (11 miles) from Bergamo. It is a working-class village founded in 1878, completed at the end of the 1920s and has remained unchanged to this day. It is a perfect example of industrial architecture and in 1995, UNESCO named it a World Heritage Site. The Crespi were a family from Busto Arsizio that were in the textile manufacturing business. At the end of the 1800s, Cristoforo Benigno Crespi found the area at the border between the provinces of Bergamo and Milano, where they are divided by the Adda River, and bought the land, re-routed water from a canal to generate power and built the first part of the production facility, the spinning mill. Cristoforo’s son, Silvio, took the project even further. After graduating from university, he travelled and worked in Germany and England. It was in the latter that he discovered the Garden Cities, urban centres where work facilities and residences were adjacent. After he returned to Italy, Silvio applied the Garden Cities...