Metanopoli was built in 1952, the brainchild of Enrico Mattei (head of the nascent oil and petrol company ENI), who commissioned the architect and town planner Mario Bacciocchi to design a new garden city for ENI’s white collar workers. The architect’s brief was to integrate residential, social and production functions in an area straddling via Emilia in the municipality of San Donato Milanese. Bacciocchi’s plan did not envisage transforming rigid geometric grids into building lots, but rather an open format that could be added to in response to demographic and production development. Over the years, Metanopoli expanded to include a diversity of new architectural projects, rendering it an interesting example of Italian architectural and town planning history.

Today, the petrol station designed by Bacciocchi and located in Piazzale Supercortemaggiore, the name of which is a nod to the petrol produced in Cortemaggiore (PC), has been converted into the restaurant-café Caffè Minerva. Beneath the original roof, the area once used by lorries is now an outdoor space where you can enjoy a superb gin and tonic at sunset while looking out over ENI’s original headquarters, a complex made up of a series of overlapping hexagons modelled on the benzene molecule. Metanopoli and the former petrol station are among the subjects that Noah Barker reunited and reconfigured for the project Five Summer Stories (17 May – 18 September 2020), an initiative that reflected on the processes of centralisation and decentralisation that defined the 20th century.