Once an island — cut off from the rest of Milan by the railway tracks and the canals that once ran here — Isola was for a century a working-class district of artisans, anarchists, and cheap rents. The trains and the isolation gave it a reputation for being a world apart, and even now, hemmed against the gleaming towers of Porta Nuova, it keeps a scruffier, more independent feel than almost anywhere else this central.
The heart of it is a few low-rise streets — Via Borsieri, Via Thunberg, Piazza Minniti — where vintage shops, record stores, craft breweries, and small trattorie have moved into the old workshops. The covered Mercato Comunale Isola still sells produce, and the neighbourhood's edges run up against the Cimitero Monumentale, Milan's grand 19th-century cemetery, an open-air gallery of funerary sculpture worth an hour in its own right.
Isola is best in the evening, when its bars fill with a younger crowd doing the aperitivo away from the tourist routes. It has been steadily gentrifying since the towers went up next door, but the contrast between the new glass and the old tenements is part of what makes it interesting.