An Uninformed Guide to Milan: A Citizen Returns and is Lost Again
Before I begin, I’d like to congratulate my fellow Italians for finally sentencing Berlusconi for at least one crime. Hopefully the age of ad-personam laws is at an end, and certainly the cheer “four more years” holds a different meaning in the case of the our little Napoleon. Berlusconi, of course, was born in Milan.
Let me tell you about a city you probably don’t give a damn about, and perhaps rightly so. I want to viciously slander Milan, insult it, piss on its glories, but for all my bile I cannot hate it. I was born here, I moved here again only a few weeks ago, and I don’t understand a thing about it. The singer Giorgio Gaber began a song claiming: “I, G.G., was born and live in Milan. I don’t feel Italian, but by my luck or misfortune, I am.” I, C.C., was born and live in Milan. I don’t feel Italian, but my passport says I am. I don’t get it, so I write.
1. Water
Instead of plaques on the sides of buildings telling the world what useless industrialist or minor league politician lived there, we should have monuments to the lifelines that got covered up. On the tram a few weeks back, my dad pointed to the stairs that lead down to a new subway station: they form a humpback, two stairs up, then a small landing, and only then the descent into the earth. An underground river, the Seveso, crosses this area, from time to time creating small floods, irritating the traffic, and completely incapacitating the subway. The strange stairway is meant to keep the station from flooding, as long as the water isn’t too deep. I think back a couple of days, to a lunchtime when someone told me that the water level in Milan is steadily rising, as consumption decreases. The factories that once defined this area are dead, people moved further and further out, to Varese, Gallarate, Busto Arsizio, leaving behind offices, shops, and yes, water. Maybe we don’t need monuments, warning signs might do.
You can’t blame anyone for wanting to move away from Milan: the economic capital of Italy sits on the wide plane that divides the Alps from the Apennines like a house on a garbage heap, surrounded by evil humours, connected to nothing interesting or useful. The two mountain ranges keep it free from wind, so that all that grey-brown air simply circles endlessly above it. Most nights it hardly gets dark at all, the air is so thick that the light from streetlamps and neon signs ends up just hanging suspended above the city. The climate has been defined “humid subtropical,” the same as the American South and the east coast of China. Quando ci pensi, è pazzesco. When you think about it, it’s crazy.
The Celts who founded Milan may not have expected the problems that would arise with industrialization and pollution, but they certainly didn’t bother to look for a decent-sized river to build the city next to. It took two millennia and Leonardo da Vinci to give the place any kind of usable waterway. The Navigli are supposed to be Milan’s saving grace, after the Duomo, La Scala, and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. You will often find black and white photos on the walls of cafès, restaurants, and grandparents’ houses, which depict these canals as romantic, covered in snow, or traversed by lazy barges carrying metals, coke, or industrial waste. Nostalgia for the years of the Cinquecento and the Vespa, of Italian-language covers of American songs, eternal summers of sunglasses, children, and Pier Paolo Pasolini interviewing modest twentysomethings about love. You need water for nostalgia, and when it’s lacking you dig.
The other piece of water sacred to Milan is the Idroscalo, the seaplane airport built, of course, during the Fascist era, and now the home to kayaking, sailing, and all those other bullshit sports people do when there’s no other way of making themselves interesting. Fascism built a good part of the city we have today, starting with the Central Station. The great irony is that this building, so massive, so oppressive, so obviously fascist, was actually modelled on Union Station in Washington. It is both impressive and a complete mess: from afar it looks ridiculous, an odd squat shape covered in griffins, lions, eagles, and fasces. It’s only when it’s looming over you that you understand its real dimensions, the tons and tons of stone frowning from above. Central Station is the appropriate symbol of what Milan is becoming: a vast, disapproving structure expelling people, a place where only the homeless remain for any length of time. It is true that the population has slightly increased in the last decade, a reversal of the drastic decrease after the 70s, but all the symbolic buildings of Milan seem to say one thing: work here, buy here, take a picture, but then get the fuck out.
2. Milan, l’è on gran Milan!
The rich and the homeless, the working and the dead. It’s hard to keep in mind any idea of a real, living Milan. I walk endlessly and forget the last time I saw colour until, suddenly, the joy of red from union flags. And I become sad that I should find this a source of relief, when the protest is so small, the police so indifferent, the mood so low. Milan likes to talk about work, but forgets that there are workers.
The traditional image Milan would like to project is that of the respectable, well-to-do bourgeoisie, going for walks in fur coats, and to the opera in even furrier coats, but most of all going to work, always work, forever work. And Milan’s respectability and hard work are not simply relished with smugness, they are the weapons with which Milan rabidly attacks its citizens from the south of Italy, foreigners, the poor, the homeless.
Milan’s respectability is also the blindness that leads people to take up causes like that of the utterly demented Northern League, the kind of party whose slogan is ‘The League has a hard-on,’ whose politicians get caught harassing Muslim women, and who were influential enough to form a coalition with Berlusconi’s PDL party and control a large part of a country they didn’t even want to be part of. Milan’s respectability has received another crashing blow recently, as regional politicians are being caught doing favours for the ‘Ndragheta; as Milan is revealed as just another fucked-up city in a fucked-up country.
But there’s a side to Milan that isn’t mentioned half so often. Milan, the capital of the Resistance during fascism, where to this day you can find a road dedicated to Karl Marx (the American School is in Via Carlo Marx), and another to Stalingrad (in Sesto San Giovanni, known first as Little Manchester, and then as Little Stalingrad, usually by its critics.) It is this leftist history of Milan that probably led to its becoming the first target in the strategy of tension which began in 1969, with the bombing at Piazza Fontana. The story of the defenestrated anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli was the inspiration for Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist, and the rallying call for leftists and anarchists for decades after, but most of all it was another example of the city failing to keep up appearances. Of course, every city, every State, needs to keep up appearances, but there is a perverse sense of glee when the City of Fashion lets her dirty knickers show. Satisfaction when the city fails by its own hands, fails that stupid dream of fur coats, breaded veal and Campari. Milan is no better than anywhere else, but simply by stating that, it becomes habitable again.
Bombed to hell in ’43. Mostly ugly, a little unfriendly, stuffy in summer and freezing in winter. But you can live here, like anywhere else.
3. What am I doing here?
There is a Milan in Michigan, about 50 miles from Detroit. I looked it up on Googlemaps. It has a river. There’s one in Illinois too, and one in Tennessee. Milan, TN, which unfortunately is pronounced “MY-lunn,” has no river, and also lies in an area of “humid subtropical climate.” There are plenty others. Even Iran has a Milan, though only a small village.
