In 1958, along the Autostrada dei Laghi, a construction appeared that seemed to have come from space: a circular glass building surmounted by three gigantic arches. It was the Pavesi Autogrill in Villoresi Ovest, designed by Angelo Bianchetti.
More than sixty years later, it is still there, recounting the era when the automobile, holidays, and a stop on the highway represented the promise of a new Italy.
You’d have to try looking at it through the eyes of a 1958 motorist. No navigators, no smartphones, no identical international chains from one highway to another. In front of the windshield runs a road that, for millions of Italians, already represents something extraordinarily modern. Then, at the height of Lainate, a structure appears that is difficult to forget. Three huge white arches rise into the sky. Below, almost suspended in the highway landscape, is a circular building wrapped in glass. At the top stands the name Pavesi. It doesn’t look like a trattoria. It doesn’t look like a gas station. Rather, it resembles a machine built for a future yet to come. It was Villoresi Ovest. And that future, for Italy, was indeed coming.
1958, Italy begins to run
The Villoresi Ovest service station was inaugurated in 1958 along the Autostrada dei Laghi, in the Lainate area, just outside Milan. The project bore the signature of architect Angelo Bianchetti, a figure destined to leave a profound mark on Italian commercial and motorway architecture. But to understand why that building became so important, we must forget for a moment what we mean today by the word autogrill. By the late 1950s, Italy was entering one of the fastest economic and social transformations in its history. Factories produced. Cities were growing. Families were beginning to buy refrigerators, televisions, appliances. And especially cars. Fiat 500 and 600 were not just means of transport. They were symbols of emancipation. Owning a car meant being able to leave.
Mario Pavesi had understood everything before
The story had begun a few years earlier. Mario Pavesi, a Piedmontese entrepreneur with ties to the confectionery company of the same name, had realized that the new Italian roads would not just be infrastructure for getting around. They would become places of consumption. As early as 1947, a refreshment point linked to the Pavesi biscuit factory had opened along the Turin-Milan line, near Novara. The idea was simple but bound to have enormous consequences: intercept drivers while traveling and offer them a place to stop, eat, and buy products. Today it seems normal. In post-war Italy it was not at all.
The road becomes a market
Pavesi understood that motorization would create new habits. The driver was not just a person in transit. He was a new consumer. He needed fuel, of course, but also coffee, sandwiches, sweets, food and take-home goods. The highway was generating an entirely new commercial geography. And this geography needed its own architecture. This is where Angelo Bianchetti enters the scene.
The architect of speed
Bianchetti had experience in the world of communication, set-ups and advertising architecture. He understood the design problem perfectly: along a highway a building cannot behave like an urban building. It must be recognizable from afar. He needs to talk to someone who is moving quickly. He can’t wait for the passerby to stop in front of the window. It must catch its attention hundreds of meters earlier. Villoresi Ovest was born from this logic. Architecture and advertising became the same thing.
Three arches in the sky
The solution designed by Bianchetti was radical. The restaurant had a circular plan and large glass surfaces. Above the building rose the gigantic tripod formed by the three arches, capable of raising the Pavesi sign to about 51 metres in height. There was no need for a billboard next to the restaurant. The restaurant itself was the billboard. The structure could be recognized from afar as the car approached. It was advertising turned into architecture.
A spaceship on the Milan-Lakes
Not surprisingly, the building has been compared over time to a spaceship or launch pad. Those shapes belonged perfectly to the imagination of the time. Those were the years of the space race, of technology celebrated as a promise, of atomic energy, of new materials and of a confidence in progress that today appears almost unrepeatable. Even a highway restaurant could therefore take on futuristic forms. In fact, he had to. Those traveling to Milan or the lakes didn’t just see a place to drink coffee. He saw an idea of modernity materialize.
Eating while watching cars
The large glass walls had a precise meaning. The journey entered the venue. The cars kept running while you ate. Traffic wasn’t something to hide. It was the show. To understand this, we must free ourselves from the contemporary perception of the highway as an inevitable and often stressful space. In the boom years, the highway was an achievement. Going to see cars, driving down a new thoroughfare, stopping at a modern refreshment point could become part of the Sunday outing.
The Sunday rite
In the following years, service stations became real destinations. Families would get in their cars, leave, and stop for lunch. The children were looking at the cars. Adults entered the bazaars, forerunners of today’s markets, where they could find products known through television and advertising. The highway stop was entering consumer society just as consumer society was being born.
Modernity tasted like a sandwich
It is difficult to explain today how modern it might have seemed to eat a meal along the highway. Today, eating while traveling is an almost automatic gesture. Then it was part of a new way of life. Speed also changed the relationship with food. It was no longer necessary to enter the village, look for a trattoria and spend a lot of time stopping. The service suited the road. The traveler could stop, eat, buy something and leave again. Italy was discovering a new dimension of consumption.
Before the bridge there was Villoresi
When we think of historic Italian service stations, the most famous image is probably that of restaurants built above the highway. But Villoresi Ovest arrived first. In 1959, just a year later, Bianchetti designed what is remembered as Europe’s first bridge service station for Pavesi in Fiorenzuola d’Arda. A glass gallery crossed the roadway allowing customers to eat while watching cars pass under them. The concept would be replicated and would mark the Italian motorway imagination of the 1960s. Villoresi therefore belongs to the immediately preceding moment, the one in which the architecture of the stopover was still inventing its own language.
Pavesi, Motta, Alemagna: the battle of the highways
Success did not go unnoticed. Pavesi wasn’t alone. Motta and Alemagna entered the competition to win over Italian motorists. The highways thus became the terrain of a surprising race between the food industry, communication and architecture. Motta-grill, Alemagna autobar and Autogrill Pavesi were born. Each brand was looking for visibility. And to be visible at a hundred kilometers per hour, spectacular buildings were needed. From this competition was born an extraordinary season of Italian commercial architecture.
The motorway as a showcase of Italy
The phenomenon perfectly told the story of the country. On one side were the food industries that were becoming national brands. On the other, the construction of the motorway network. In between was a population that was beginning to move, consume and go on holiday. The Autogrill became the point where these transformations met. It was a restaurant, shop, advertising sign and architecture.
Life looks at Lainate
Villoresi also attracted international attention. On September 26, 1960, the American magazine Life dedicated space to the structure in a report on Italy and the European economic rebirth. It wasn’t a secondary recognition. Italy, which had emerged from the war just fifteen years earlier, managed to present itself abroad through a completely different image: dynamic, industrial, sophisticated, capable of producing contemporary design and architecture. A highway refreshment point thus became an involuntary ambassador of the economic miracle.
The Italy that wanted to be modern
Villoresi’s symbolic strength lies right here. It is not necessary to consider it solely for the architectural quality. It must be observed as a historical document. Those arches tell what Italy thought it could become. A modern, industrial, mobile country. A country where the automobile would shorten distances and new infrastructure would unite cities and territories. Of course, we know that that modernization would also have had environmental, urban planning and social costs. But in 1958, enthusiasm prevailed.
Leaving becomes possible
Before mass motorization, travel was a very different experience for most families. Everything changes with the small car. Milan can reach the lakes. Turin can get closer to Liguria. Summer holidays become a mass phenomenon. Sundays out of town multiply. The highway does not only connect two geographical points. It changes the way Italians imagine their free time.
Italian design even on the road
When we talk about Made in Italy during the boom years, cars, scooters, furniture, fashion, and household appliances immediately come to mind. But the success of Italian design was also the ability to design the places of the new society. Stations, shops, exhibition halls, distributors and refreshment areas were participating in the same transformation. Villoresi demonstrates that even a highway stop could become a cultural project.
Then the future became daily
It is the fate of almost all innovations. First they surprise, then they become normal. The highway gradually lost the spectacular character of its origins. Cars increased. Traffic and queues came. Service areas multiplied and were standardized. Stopping for coffee stopped being a modern experience and simply became a necessity of the journey. Architecture also changed. Many structures of the great highway season were transformed, demolished, or lost their original function.
Villoresi remained
At Lainate, however, the large tripod continued to mark the landscape. Time inevitably forced interventions and adjustments. In 2020, Villoresi Ovest underwent a major conservative reconstruction project. The works mainly concerned the underlying structure, while the characteristic arched tripod was preserved. The project maintained the reference to Bianchetti’s original idea by introducing systems, materials and solutions compatible with contemporary standards.