Palazzo Mezzanotte

Headquarter of the stock exchange, it played an important role in the Resistance in Milan.

In 1927, the architect Paolo Mezzanotte started designing the building destined to host both the Italian stock exchange and all goods exchanges.

The stock exchange was inaugurated in 1932, after a delay in the construction due to the discovery, in the foundations, of the ruins of a roman theater.

In order to highlight its monumental facade made of white marble, with an overlying gable and four huge columns supporting it, the architect had envisioned the presence of a big square in front of it. However, since the surrounding buildings were never demolished, it remained a project that jeopardized the majesty of the overall design, since it lacked sufficient perspective.

It was, however, a state-of-the-art project, with a system of air conditioning and a luminous electric board where you could simultaneously read the price of all the 78 listed stocks.

The place had a bar-restaurant-ballroom called Taverna Ferrario, accessible from a slightly hidden  entrance on the side, which preserved the sacredness of the place.

The “shouting room” was the place where verbal tradings were carried out until 1987. Today, the room is open for tourists. It was called the “shouting room” because in order to buy or sell stocks, one always had to yell at the top of their lungs.

Fascism did not like stock exchanges. Despite the fact that one of Mussolini’s first provisions, in November 1922, was the abolition of nominative shares, called for by the industrialists and capitalists of the North, it is also true that, once the regime obtained their satisfied consensus, the existence of a free market was in contrast with its own corporate dirigisme.

In 1925 already, De Stefani’s decrees strongly limited the stock exchange activity. The crisis of 1929 did the rest. Between the two world wars, the Borsa di Milano represented, however, Italy’s industrial fabric; in 1945, Palazzo Mezzanotte remained undamaged among the ruins of Milan, a symbol of Italy ready to rise again.

The “prince of piazza Affari” was Antonio Foglia in the 1930s and after the Liberation, when he became president of the Comitato direttivo degli agenti di cambio. Up until the 1980s, such title was held by Aldo Ravelli, the person to whom the Fondazione Memoria della Deportazione is dedicated.

Andrea Lorenzetti, hero of the anti-nazi resistance, worked as a stock agent for the former and was deported together with the latter to Gusen (Mauthausen). Lorenzetti dictated to Ravelli his last will right before dying in Gusen on 15th May 1945.

 

Guido Lorenzetti