Milan has for me always been the Italian city with the greatest significance. My mother’s parents lived there and for some of my early life I was brought up by them in their top-most flat situated on the Piazza Duca D’Aosta fronting that grandiloquent display of neo- Assyrian architecture which is Milan’s central station.
This is a bird’s eye view of the flat showing that it is the only one with a terrace in that block. I note that on the north side of the terrace some greenery has been added.
It was on this terrace that I would enjoy my ‘tinned’ baths:
My grandparents, however, were not originally Milanese. My grandmother was born in Turin and my grandfather spent his early days at the naval port of La Spezia where his father was a carabiniere. My mother, however, was born in Milan and lived in Via San Marco where, in the local church, Verdi’s Requiem received its first performance on May 22nd 1874, exactly one year after the death of its dedicatee, Alessandro Manzoni, author of ‘I Promessi Sposi’, better known in English as ‘The Betrothed’ and Italy’s seminal novel, not only because it is so engrossingly written but because it set the pattern for modern Italian prose writing.
Although Milan was a city I lived a considerable part of my early life it was only later that I began to appreciate its artistic wonders, some of which are the most extraordinary in the whole of Italy.
Yet Milan is not a city to immediately attract the visitor’s eye unlike places like Venice, Perugia, Naples, Florence and Genoa, for, in the midst of its modern architecture, Milan does not present a characteristic Italian mediaeval historical centre, although it does have many mediaeval buildings, including one of Europe’s finest gothic cathedrals and one of the most imposing castles in the peninsula.
This lack of immediate beauty in Milan is because of three main reasons.
First, there was considerable nineteenth century redevelopment in an ambitious attempt to bring the rapidly growing industrial and commercial centre up to date with other European cities. Milan remains Italy’s and one of Europe’s financial hubs. Indeed, the city of London’s Lombard Street is evidence of how much Milanese finance became a component of England’s capital city. Part of this rebuilding included, as in Florence, the demolition of the old city walls, the ‘bastioni’, leaving just the gates which give their names to Milan’s main areas.
(The ‘bastioni’ of Porta Venezia)
Here is one of the gates remaining. It’s Porta Nuova, one of the earliest photos I took with my then new Bencini Comet II camera.
(My early picture of Porta Nuova)
Second, Milan was very heavily bombed during World War II (especially during 1943-4) and lost several characteristic streets and many noble palazzi. Although some famous buildings were restored – among the first was the city’s world-famous opera house, ‘Teatro alla Scala’: its reconstruction pleaded for by the great conductor Arturo Toscanini who knew how its restoration would contribute to raising Milanese morale. – others unfortunately disappeared for ever; for example the wonderful palazzo Archinto behind the Duomo, the cathedral, with its ceilings frescoed by Tiepolo.
This sad fact I discovered by exploring Milan with a pre-war guide to the city published by the Italian Automobile Club. I had thought the palazzo was still standing but, instead a new office building had risen in its place. One of the employees kindly showed me black-and-white photographs of the magnificent frescoes Milan had lost thanks to the sorties of the liberating US flying fortresses.
Happily, however, several other palazzi with gorgeous Tiepolo frescoes still stand in Milan.
Palazzo Isimbardi, Milan’s Town Hall:
Tapestry room: Palazzo Clerici:
Ballroom: Palazzo Dugnani
Luckily, as I later discovered, Milan remains a world centre of Art Nouveau architecture, or ‘Stile Liberty’ as it is known in Italy. My tour of these remarkable and newly revalued buildings with David Hill who worked for the British council but who is now, alas, departed from this world, will always rest in my memory. One of the most spectacular buildings of Milanese Art Deco, David pointed out, is the Casa Galimberti near Porta Venezia.
Third, much like what happened with London when, thanks to bureaucratic vandalism, it lost, among other treasures, the Euston Arch and the Coal Exchange, the sixties and seventies were decades with scant appreciation of nineteenth century buildings. True, some fine modern architecture was erected during this period. As a child I excitedly witnessed the progress of Pier Luigi Nervi’s ‘Pirellone’, for a long time Europe’s tallest building, rising up to seemingly stratospheric heights on the opposite side of the square we lived in. Now the headquarters of Milan’s civic administration, the skyscraper was once the headquarters of Pirelli – a company which my wife was to work for as official translator and with her own secretary.
Sadly, however, it was during this somewhat iconoclastic period of the city’s history that many of its characteristic ‘palazzini’ apartment blocks, dating from pre-unification days and now considered too unhygienic, came under the pick-axe to be replaced by concrete monstrosities.
Among the greatest losses I list the covering up and disappearance of most of the characteristic Milanese ‘navigli’ or canals which connected the city to the rivers Adda and the Po and which were main arteries of transport even after the railways had reached the city. In particular, I remember the Naviglio della Martesana running behind the Salesian institute where my grandmother used to take me for catechism lessons.
What would I give for these wonderful canals to be restored to the open air again?
(Via Melchiorre Gioia, Milan, as it was until the 60’s with the Martesana canal skirting it. The church is the basilica of Sant’Agostino of the Salesian Institute Don Bosco where I learned my catechism.
