Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
16. Milan and Como
I arrived in Milan in mid-afternoon, expecting great things. It is after all the richest city in Italy, the
headquarters of many of the most famous names of Italian commerce: Campari, Benetton, Armani, Alfa-
Romeo, the Memphis design group, and the disparate empires of Silvio Berlusconi and Franco Maria
Ricci. But this, as I should have realized beforehand, is its problem. Cities that are dedicated to making
money, and in Milan they appear to think about little else, seldom have much energy left for charm.
I got a room in an expensive but nondescript hotel across from the monumental white marble central
railway station - like something built for Mussolini to give a strutting address to massed crowds - and
embarked on a long, hot walk into town along the Via Pisani. This was a broad, modern boulevard, more
American than European. It was lined with sleek glass and chrome office buildings, but the central grass
strip was scrubby and uncared-for and the few benches where you could rest had syringes scattered
beneath them. As I moved further into the city the buildings became older and rather more pleasing, but
there was still something lacking. I paused to consult my map in a tiny park on a pleasant residential street
near the cathedral square and it was depressingly squalid - grassless and muddy, with broken benches,
and pigeons picking among hundreds of cigarette butts and disused tram tickets. I find that hard to excuse
in a rich city.
Two blocks on and Milan blossomed. Clustered together were the city's three glories: La Scala, the
Duomo and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. I went first to the cathedral - cavernous and Gothic, the third-
largest church in the world - begrimed on the outside and covered in scaffolding, and so gloomy within that
it took me whole minutes to find the ceiling. It was quite splendid in a murky sort of way and entirely free of
tourists, which was a happy novelty after Florence. Here it was just a constant stream of locals popping in to
add a candle to the hundreds already burning and say a quick 'Ave Maria' before heading home for supper.
I liked that. It is such an unusual sight to find a grand church being used for its intended purpose.
Afterwards I crossed the cathedral square to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele and spent a happy hour
wandering through it, hands behind my back, browsing in the windows and noting with unease the
occasional splats from the pigeons that had managed to sneak in and were now leading a rewarding life
gliding among the rafters and shitting on the people below. It is an imposing shopping arcade, four storeys
high, built in the grandiose style of the 1860s and still probably the most handsome shopping mall in the
world, with floors of neatly patterned tiles, a vaulted latticework roof of glass and steel, and a cupola rising
160 feet above a rotunda where the two interior avenues intersect. It has the loftiness and echoing hush, and
even the shape, of a cathedral, but with something of the commercial grandness of a nineteenth-century
railway station thrown in. Every shopping centre should be like this.
Needing my afternoon infusion of caffeine, I took a table outside one of the three or four rather elegant
caf￩s scattered among the shops. It was one of those typically European places where they have seventy
tables and one hopelessly overworked waiter, who dashes around trying to deliver orders, clear tables and
take money all at the same time, and who has the cheerful, nothing's-too-much-trouble attitude that you
would expect of someone in such an interesting and remunerative line of work. You don't get a second
chance in these places. I was staring at nothing in particular, chin in hand, idly wondering if Ornella Muti had
ever done any mud wrestling, when it filtered through to my consciousness that the waiter was making one
of his rare visits to my vicinity and had actually said to me, 'Prego?'
I looked up. 'Oh, an espres—' I said, but he was gone already and I realized that I was never going to
get this close to him again unless I married his sister. So with a sigh of resignation I pulled myself up, moved
sideways through the tiny gaps between the tables, grimacing apologetically as I caused a succession of
unforgiving people to slop their coffee or plunge their noses into their gateaux, and returned unrefreshed to
the streets.
I strolled along the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, a wide pedestrian shopping street, looking for an
alternative caf￩ and finding none. For a moment I thought I had died and been sent by mistake to yuppie
heaven. Unlike the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, where at least there were a couple of bookshops and an art
gallery or two, here and on the neighbouring streets there was nothing to sustain the mind or soul, just
