Milan - City of Contrasts

Many moons ago, when I was first toying with the idea of moving to Italy, I asked someone in London for advice. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s pretty simple, really: if you go to one of the beautiful cities, like Rome, Florence, or Venice, then it’ll be hard to find work, as that’s where everyone wants to go. If, on the other hand, you’re prepared to try one of the ugly industrial cities, like Turin or Milan, then it’ll be a lot easier.’

Encouraged by this somewhat back-handed endorsement, I went to Milan and found that my advisor (whose name I have long since forgotten) was right. Nor was he referring just to employment prospects for aspiring ex-pats: Milan and Turin are where Italians of every type migrate in order to find work. Milan’s first industrial boom (which is the subject of an excellent exhibition at the Palazzo Reale: Il Mondo Nuovo – the New World – until 28th February) took place at the start of the 20th century, while the second came about with Italy’s ‘economic miracle’ in the 1950s and 1960s. Today Italians still move to Milan to work in its ‘post-industrial service sectors,’ but the predominant immigrant groups are from East European and Third World countries, making the city something of a multi-ethnic melting pot.

If that sounds rather American, then this is intentional. If Rome, thanks to its vast bureaucratic machines (created by the state, the church and assorted international agencies) and TV and film industries, is a combination of Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, then Milan is Italy’s New York. Like New York, it is home to its country’s stock exchange and financial hub; it is similarly dominant in terms of fashion, design and advertising, and it also runs the nation’s music industry, even if the artists themselves invariably hail from elsewhere. And, as if to emphasise the similarities between the two cities, Milan has its own admittedly miniature version of the World Trade Center attacks. In April 2002 a wayward two-seater plane mysteriously crashed into the Pirelli Building, killing the pilot and two office workers and creating panic in the streets below. The Pirelli building, like the Twin Towers, is a symbol of its city: it was built during the post-war boom and for many years it was Europe’s tallest skyscraper.

The similarities between Milan and New York also extend to their inhabitants. The Milanese, like their counterparts in the Big Apple, are dynamic, hard-working, ambitious and, ultimately, self-obsessed. Even in their leisure hours their favourite topic of conversation is themselves and their careers, which tends to make them less entertaining company than the more laid-back Romans. Nobody personifies the Milanese character better than Italy’s current prime mini-ster, the Napoleonically diminutive media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, who is the archetypal ‘self-made man who worships his creator’.

Being Somewhere Else

As a tourist attraction, however, Milan is sadly not in the same league as New York. Indeed its appeal as a city is its proximity to more beautiful places. The northern Italian lakes like Maggiore and Como (which, incidentally, are more popular with the British, Germans and French than the Italians themselves, who consider them ‘melancholic’) are only an hour away, while, if you want to go skiing in the mountains in winter, or swimming and sailing off the Ligurian coast in the summer, then you can get there in two hours. As a result, the locals tend to flee the city at weekends, making the Sunday night ‘rientro,’ or re-entry, to Milan a traffic nightmare: if you can reach your weekend getaway on Italy’s unbelievably cheap (compared to the UK's) rail network, then so much the better. If Milan’s closeness to areas of outstanding natural beauty is an undoubted asset, then it creates a strange attitude. As a friend who moved to the city from Genoa once observed: ‘Whenever the weather is beautiful in Milan you hear people say, ‘Oh, this is the sort of day you should be in the mountains,’ or ‘this is the sort of day to go the seaside.’ People never think this a day to be in Milan. It’s as if they always want to be somewhere else.’