Sundays in Piazza Affari

On a Sunday morning in Milan, Piazza Affari is a rather different place from the one it was designed to be. During the working week, the square belongs to finance. Palazzo Mezzanotte, home of the Italian stock exchange, provides the imposing backdrop, while Maurizio Cattelan’s monumental L.O.V.E. sculpture stands at its centre. On Sundays, however, another economy takes over. The currency is mechanical rather than monetary, and value becomes considerably harder to measure. A Ferrari F40 may arrive to considerable attention, only to find itself parked near an Innocenti Mini. Elsewhere there might be an Alfa Romeo Spider, an old Porsche or a Japanese youngtimer whose market value is barely relevant to the interest surrounding it. Owners talk. People photograph details. Children peer through windows. Cars come and go. There is no concours judging or carefully constructed field designed to establish a hierarchy.

This is Quelli di Piazza Affari, a gathering that has grown remarkably quickly from an informal Milanese Sunday meeting into something considerably larger. Its beginnings were modest. In February 2025, Carlo Vulnera created the Instagram account @quellidipiazzaaffari and began bringing enthusiasts together in the square. At the first gathering, among the cars present were a Fiat Uno Turbo, a red Porsche 912 and an Alfa Romeo Spider Duetto. “It was a simple scene,” Vulnera recalls, “yet it already captured the spirit of the project: very different cars brought together by a shared passion.” Then more began arriving. Not through a traditional club structure or formal calendar of entrants. People saw what was happening, shared photographs and returned the following Sunday. The selection became increasingly unpredictable. “From the very first Sunday onwards, more and more people started arriving from across Northern Italy with fascinating, rare and unique cars,” says Vulnera. “Watching the attendance grow week after week, along with the enthusiasm of the community, was the moment I realised that what had started as a small gathering between enthusiasts had the potential to become something much bigger.”

The interesting part of Piazza Affari is not necessarily which cars appear there. It is what happens when they are put together. The collector-car world has become increasingly organised over the past two decades. There are concours events at one end, specialist marque clubs and historic racing elsewhere, surrounded by an enormous ecosystem of informal meets and online communities. These worlds frequently overlap, but they can also create their own boundaries. Piazza Affari works differently because its lack of a rigid theme allows combinations that would look unusual almost anywhere else. Vulnera remembers 18 April particularly clearly. A Ferrari F40 arrived in the square and found itself alongside an Innocenti Mini. On paper, there is almost no sensible comparison between them.

One is among the defining supercars of its generation, now carrying a seven-figure valuation in the international collector market. The other represents an entirely different strand of Italian motoring history: small, accessible and once part of ordinary life. In Piazza Affari, both had earned their parking space in exactly the same way. Someone had driven them there. “A car doesn’t need to be valuable or exclusive to belong here,” Vulnera explains. “What matters is the story it tells, the emotions it inspires and the passion of the person behind the wheel.” It was this unusual mix that first caught my attention at Retromotive. I wanted to understand why such different cars, and such different people, were finding their way to the same Milanese square every Sunday. Maintaining that philosophy becomes more complicated as a gathering grows.

Success has a habit of changing informal car culture. A handful of friends becomes fifty cars; fifty becomes several hundred. Social media attracts spectators as well as participants. Logistics appear. Safety becomes an issue. Rules that once seemed unnecessary gradually become unavoidable. Quelli di Piazza Affari is already navigating that transition. Vulnera arrives at around eight on Sunday morning, well before the official gathering begins, and is usually among the last to leave. He describes his role less as an organiser than as a host, greeting arrivals and helping position cars around the square. There are now guidelines. The central area is generally reserved for classics, with other cars arranged around it. A security team has also been introduced to protect visitors and the increasingly significant collection of machinery that can assemble on a busy morning. “As the gatherings have grown, it has naturally become more challenging to preserve the same atmosphere, especially when hundreds of cars and thousands of visitors arrive every Sunday,” Vulnera admits. That may prove to be the project’s most important challenge. Its attraction comes partly from the absence of the machinery surrounding a conventional event. The gathering remains free, and classic cars and youngtimers can simply arrive. Grow too much, and spontaneity becomes difficult. Organise too much and the thing that attracted people in the first place risks disappearing. “We are not an exclusive club, and we do not charge membership fees; everything remains spontaneous, natural and free of charge.”

There is something particularly appropriate about this happening in Milan. The city’s relationship with the automobile has never depended solely on manufacturing. Turin may have the more obvious industrial connection to the Italian motor car, and Modena its mythology, but Milan has long provided another ingredient: context. Designers, coachbuilders, publishers and creative studios have repeatedly moved through the city’s orbit, shaping much of the culture around how the automobile was presented and understood. Piazza Affari adds an interesting contradiction. This is not a romantic cobbled piazza or the forecourt of a country villa. It is the financial centre of modern Milan, dominated by severe twentieth-century architecture. Against it, the curves of an Alfa Spider or the uncompromising geometry of an F40 can look almost like objects temporarily removed from a design exhibition. Vulnera believes that setting has been fundamental.

“Milan has always had a unique relationship with design, style and automotive culture,” he says. “The people of Milan welcomed us with curiosity and respect, even as the automotive world moves increasingly towards sustainability and electrification.” Urban access restrictions and changing attitudes towards private transport are reshaping European cities, Milan included. A weekly gathering of combustion-engined cars in the centre of a major European city could easily position itself as an act of resistance. Quelli di Piazza Affari does not appear interested in doing so. Vulnera instead regards the cars as part of an existing cultural history, rather than competitors with whatever comes next.

Ask Vulnera for the moment when he realised the gathering had become more significant than expected, and he does not mention the Lamborghini Countach. He remembers a Triumph. A father and son arrived together in the British sports car. Watching them brought back memories of his own childhood and Sunday mornings spent with his father, when old cars first captured his attention. “Today I see countless fathers, grandfathers, sons and grandchildren sharing that same passion.” “To me, that is one of the most meaningful aspects of our gatherings: passing automotive culture and enthusiasm from one generation to the next.” There has also been a less predictable demographic shift. Vulnera says one of the biggest surprises has been the number of young visitors, particularly young women, who have become interested in the gatherings. Some initially come to photograph the cars rather than because they already know their histories. Curiosity often comes before knowledge. This is worth considering at a time when concern about the ageing demographic of the classic-car world has become almost routine.

The traditional route into the hobby was often inherited. A particular model mattered because a parent owned one or because it appeared on the road during childhood. For younger enthusiasts, that route is changing. A twenty-year-old in 2026 has no first-hand memory of a Fiat Uno Turbo as a new car. An Alfa Spider may belong to a period decades before they were born. Yet Instagram, photography and gatherings such as this can remove the requirement for nostalgia altogether. Around Piazza Affari, Vulnera has watched new photography pages, automotive social accounts, videos and interviews emerge from people who first encountered these cars through the Sunday meetings. Not all of them will become collectors. They do not need to.