Sunday 25 May, 2024

1. Various concerns

Last Saturday, I was given a leaflet in Treviglio by a small group called “Pro Italia”, a movement in favour of leaving the EU, a more understanding relationship with Putin, and abandoning the ‘mad dogma of ecological transition’. I didn’t ask them what their take was on the Covid vaccine but I think I can guess. Their arguments against measures to combat ever-growing atmospheric pollution and its disastrous effects on climate were that the latter was exaggerated and the former is ‘a direct attack on our lifestyle‘ (their emphasis). Poor things! I imagine that extreme weather events, rising sea levels and shifts in climatic patterns could affect their lifestyle even more drastically.

2. Milan walk: an enigmatic inscription, a place of infamy, an old café and south of Via Meravigli

I emerged from the Metro to a sparsely peopled Piazza Duomo at about a quarter past eight. There was the familiar facade of the Duomo (where late Gothic ends in early Baroque) with its enigmatic Latin dedication: Mariae nascenti

This is sometimes translated as a dedication to the ‘birth’ or ‘nativity’ of Mary, but it should be ‘to Mary in the act of being born’—not a subject that has been taken up by painters. Indeed, on the front of a cathedral with thousands of statues, we have this unusual conceptual dedication, with no idea of the midwife and the delivery room but with a suggestion of the mystery of coming into life, taking form, emerging into the world, of being created. It’s a dedication that sounds Eastern Mediterranean in its mysticism and gives me the idea of everything being continually born (a feeling I can get by closing my eyes for five seconds before opening them to the wonderful re-creation of the visible world).

Next to Piazza Duomo is Piazza dei Mercanti, an enclosed rectangular piazza, the former centre of civic life, with historic buildings from the thirteenth to early seventeenth centuries—full of interest, therefore, yet sadly neglected, treated by the city and the owners of the buildings as an unlovely back yard. And the unloveliest corner is a late nineteenth-century neo-medieval building in the southeast corner, closed and shuttered, its windows dirty and dusty, its signboards obliterated, and even the name cancelled on the bell beside the heavily locked side door. This was the home of the Banca Rasini, a private bank with only one office, where Berlusconi’s father worked most of his life and ended up as director, a bank used for money laundering by the Sicilian mafia, murderers and drug dealers, and used by Silvio Berlusconi for his own shady business operations. The thought of its history leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Time for a coffee.

I went along Via Dante to Via Meravigli, a street of narrow pavements and clanging trams, where 300 hundred metres along on the left was my destination, Pasticceria Marchesi. Founded in 1824, inside it’s the kind of shop you might imagine from Jane Austen’s time: a rectangular space with low, old-fashioned display cases of cakes and chocolates on one short side and half the adjoining long side and open shelves behind; a lot gleaming old wood; on the other short side a bar staffed by smart white-jacketed barmen; a couple of customers inspecting the cakes like in a 1920s illustrated magazine, coffee drinkers at the bar; and a short passage through to a square room with five or six tables.

This salottino had a window with a view of the remains of the fourth-century Imperial palace from when Milan had been the capital of the Western Roman Empire. There were flowers on the tables; two other tables occupied; comfortable seats; the waitress dressed in dark green with an apron. Decor and clothing were perfect, the cappuccio was creamy and well-mixed; but the ‘croissant’ was an Italian brioche, and the waitress a little detached (no smile, no extra words exchanged). I paid just under €9, about three times the normal price; but I read my book quietly for twenty minutes, the atmosphere in the salottino was pleasantly relaxed and the flowers perfumed, and the front shop was like a journey back in time.

I then began a walk around the area south of Via Meravigli, starting with the remains of the Imperial Palace just behind Marchesi—nothing much to appeal to the imagination: a series of low walls revealed by excavation. I learnt from the information panel that it was more a collection of administrative, residential and bath-house buildings. Pasticceria Marchesi is on Via S. Maria alla Porta, the porta being the entrance to the Imperial Palace complex: The street is the old Roman decumanus leading to the forum (now Piazza San Sepulcro and the Ambrosian LIbrary). No trace of the Roman grid plan of streets is evident from the map, but if you wanted you could walk along the cardus, the other main street of Roman town planning, from the forum—through a continuous line of streets, passageways and alleys—to Piazza Scala and Via Manzoni beyond.

On the corner of Via Moriggi and Via Gorani is the fifteenth-century Palazzo Moriggi, incorporating a medieval tower. Several granite plaques have been fixed to the walls: ‘Palazzo Moriggi’, ‘CCTV cameras operating day and night’, and ‘Please avoid schiamazzi notturni‘ (nighttime disturbances, excessive noise at night).

The latter is the kind of notice you might see elsewhere on a handwritten sheet pinned up inside a plastic sleeve, but here it was inscribed on a granite slab and set into the wall! I suspect the owner or administrator is someone with strong views, but also convinced, despairingly, that loud calls and conversations after a few drinks are going to be a threat for decades, perhaps even centuries.

Behind the northern continuation of Via Moriggi, Via Brisa (each continuation of a street gets its own name), is an unexpected medieval family tower (those absurd equivalents of Ferraris on city streets), built on a Roman base and surrounded by brick-wall remains of the Imperial palace around the piazza.

Parallel with Via Brisa is Via Luini, where, emerging above the wall of the Monastery of San Maurizio, you can glimpse a bell tower built atop the Roman tower that was one of the two that marked the entrance to the Circus. This was the place for chariot races, and stretched south for almost half a kilometre (built next to the Imperial Palace, so the Emperor could walk directly from Palace to Imperial box). The continuation south of Via Luini is Via Cappuccio, which has a series of imposing palazzi, of the type with courtyards and gardens behind.

Via Cappuccini

Retracing my steps north back along Via Cappucci and Via Luini took me to the corner of Corso Magenta (the continuation of Via Meravigli) and the church of San Maurizio, formerly part of the Monastero Maggiore. This is entirely covered with frescoes, the most important ones by Bernardino Luini from the 1530s (his sons did the side chapels).

The church (which was for Benedictine nuns) is divided into two parts. You first see the part for the lay faithful and its screen, behind which is the church for the nuns, who followed the service through a grating. Luini’s training in Venice is immediately clear from the colours (reds, yellows and oranges). Particularly striking are the arched section on either side of the altar with portraits of the donors, where the colours stand out from a plain dark background.

You pass through a narrow doorway into the church of the nuns, also decorated by Luini and others. The fresco of the Great Flood shows those not included in Noah’s sailing party, including (a touch of pathos) a baby placed in a little vessel.

I plunged into the maze of quiet streets again to walk to San Sepolcro, on the site of the Roman forum, then to Piazza Duomo, the Metro and the bustling crowds of Central Station.

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