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Milan wanted to take on the project of an International Exhibition although it was unrelated to the overblown expositive approach. By studying the archival documents and analyzing contemporaneous publishings, this paper meant to show how the 1906’s fair allowed Milan to demonstrate his ability and capability as well as to represent a peaceful competition with other foreign economic realities. In order to ensure a successful event, the establishment has striven to expose the modern and cosmopolitan face of Milan, inside and outside the “white city”.

Universal Exhibitions have been conceived specifically by the Western society in the second half of the XIX century. As a mirror of the second industrial revolution, which also reflected the soul of a new world held together by pioneering telegraph networks, they can actually be seen as “maps of perception” that broke with the past and formed a sort of wells ring of what was yet to come. The “great exhibition cycle”, the circuit of international events that followed with some frequency, with the exception of the period immediately following the First World War, is certainly one of those privileged perspective’s corners from which to observe social, cultural, urban and anthropological phenomena with a huge impact on European history.