I visited Crespi d'Adda in November of 2025. It never especially struck my fancy on the many previous visits to Northern Italy, and I basically went there for a tick on my list. What I saw left an unexpectedly pleasant and expectedly underwhelming impression in equal measure.

There weren't many people around. Crespi d'Adda is a living town - I saw people attending to things in their gardens, hanging laundry and such, and also occasional pedestrians going on errands. But it did not feel like there were any other visitors besides me. At the visitor center, the welcome desk was not tended, but a guy came out of a back room, having had probably heard the sound of my steps in the overall silence. He was then visibly disappointed with the fact that I did not need to engage him beyond simple greetings, being content with reading information on the wall boards.

Guided tours of the factory and the town in general are possible with certain advance preparation in warmer months, but my plans anyway included solely walking around the place. I started with the elevated viewpoint on the northern edge, and then traversed the three main parallel streets of the workers' housing blocks. Painted in different hues and surrounded by greenery, the houses offer a pleasant visual despite their seeming uniformity. Each is enclosed within a garden, which was obviously unheard of up to that date in the age of industrialization. Many have blind side windows, which is a curious feature probably driven by cost savings.

The castle-like Villa Padronale is seen in a number of perspectives around town, and yet it is hard to find a proper angle for a full view. It is set a small but discernible distance away from the town core, and is surrounded by walls and parkland, no doubt in order to preserve the privacy of the factory owner’s family. The closer you get to it, the less visible it becomes, in a sense.

The factory, the warehouses, and the huge mausoleum presiding over the town's cemetery are the other main standout features of Crespi d'Adda, further supplemented by the church and the school (which now doubles as the aforementioned visitor center).

The factory closed down over 20 years ago, and the houses were sold to private buyers as far back as the 1970s. That the town is now a museum even as people who live here are largely unrelated to its history is a curious juxtaposition.

A little over an hour seems to be enough to get a feel of Crespi d'Adda if you do not intend to tour anything. There is an electric plant that is reachable via a pleasant riverside path that I thought of walking to, but the gate leading to it was locked. I lingered a bit on that path before leaving – it was a gorgeous late-autumn midday, and there were groups of people enjoying a nice stroll, confirming the notion that this remains a living place.

Crespi d’Adda is about an hour away from Milan, off the main highway towards Bergamo.