History
San Siro to Arco della Pace: Milan's Olympic Flame in 2026
The stadium that opened the Games and the arch that kept the flame
February 5, 20264 min read
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For seventeen days in February 2026, Olympic Milan ran between two landmarks a few kilometers apart: San Siro, the stadium where the Games opened, and the Arco della Pace, the arch where the flame lived.
San Siro at 100
San Siro opened in 1926, so the stadium marked its centenary by hosting its first Olympic opening ceremony.
On February 6, 2026, the Milano Cortina torch relay ended its 63-day, 12,000-kilometer run across Italy inside those stands. The ceremony ran from Andrea Bocelli to the parade of nations, and the flame arrived last, into a stadium that had hosted a century of football. For one night the two halves of this divided football city were cheering for the same thing.
The Arch Where the Flame Lived
The cauldron did not stay at the stadium. Milan's Olympic flame burned beneath the Arco della Pace, the neoclassical arch begun in Napoleon's Milan on the road toward the Simplon Pass, finished in 1838 and dedicated to the peace that followed the Napoleonic wars.
An arch named for peace suits an Olympic flame. On opening night, Alberto Tomba and Deborah Compagnoni lit the cauldron there while its twin was lit in Cortina d'Ampezzo, the first simultaneous double lighting in Olympic history.
Tomba and Compagnoni are the two faces of Italy's golden age of alpine skiing, champions who made whole winters stop in this country. Handing them the final torches told every Italian watching whose flame this was.
On the Hour, Five to Eleven
Milan then put the fire on a schedule.
Starting February 7, the cauldron staged a short performance every evening on the hour, from 5 to 11 pm: a few minutes of movement and light set to music by Roberto Cacciapaglia, free to anyone who walked into the piazza. Most Olympic cauldrons sit behind a fence. This one kept appointments.
You could plan an evening around it the way you plan around an aperitivo. Seven shows a night, every night, in a piazza with no ticket gate, for the length of the Games.
Most of the cauldrons I have read about while building this campaign were designed for the television audience and put up with by the host city. Milan did it the other way around. The cameras got their shot on opening night, and for the next two weeks the cauldron was for the people who live there.
One Line Through the City
On a map, Corso Sempione runs northwest from the Arco della Pace toward the stadium district. Behind the arch sit Parco Sempione and the Castello Sforzesco, the fortress in the center of Milan. Stadium, boulevard, park, castle and arch sit on one line. The Olympics did not build a new Milan. They drew a line through the one that already existed.
As a runner, I like that. Anyone who runs their own city has a line they cover so often it becomes a habit. For seventeen days, Milan's had a flame at one end.
That is an older way of hosting, and Los Angeles wrote part of the playbook. The 1984 LA Games reused what the city already had, starting with the Coliseum, and used the torch relay to tie it together.
Los Angeles will draw its own line in 2028, past the Coliseum that has already hosted two Games, the beaches and the boulevards. I want to carry the flame along one short stretch of it, near my home in Santa Monica. If you know someone who has earned a leg of that route, nominate them.