A “small and gracious” Milan transpires through the vibrancy of the NoLo neighbourhood
Two words for Milan? “Small and gracious”, says Lucia Mascino during a break in the rehearsal of Smarrimento (Bewilderment) at the Teatro Franco Parenti theatre, directed by Lucia Calamaro; meantime, on the small screen, her starring role on the TV series Delitti del BarLume (Murders at BarLume), with Filippo Timi, is becoming increasingly more popular.
“Small and gracious” – two unusual terms for this metropolis that keeps on growing, investing, innovating, its cranes busy building ambitiously sumptuous neighbourhoods and high-tech companies, research centres and investment banks, luxury boutiques and fusion restaurants, in a turmoil of expanding wealth and new social issues, attractions and scary episodes of urban violence. Yet, in an incisive interview on la Repubblica (11 February), Mascini reiterates: “At first I was struck by its well-being, everyone seemed so clean, freshly showered and shampooed. Well-combed hair, scented – a bit too much perhaps. Then I changed my mind…”. Basically, “I don’t like the Milan that flaunts itself at the cocktail hour, but if you know it, you can avoid it.”
Lucia Mascino is a fine, intelligent and sensitive artist. She knows how to go beyond appearances, notices the discrepancies, explores the contradictions. And she’s deft at discerning beauty and gentleness beyond the city’s fragile trends and neurotic business deals that sharpen inequalities, at detecting the city’s ingrained traits, those that still distinguish it, that used to captivate Stendhal and, after him, generations of insightful intellectuals, artistic personalities, humanist bankers and well-educated entrepreneurs.
The message is clear – behind the skyscrapers’ thousand lights we can ultimately find a welcoming and inclusive, responsible and civil, metropolis. A metropolis we should get to know, understand and enrich, but also protect, to avoid it becoming too expensive, “a posh enclave”, a bubble of disproportionate wealth excluding young and creative people.
Reading about Milan only helps us understanding it better.
“I listen to your heart, city”, proclaimed with loving inquisitiveness Alberto Savinio during the first, thorny years of the 1940s, discovering a Milan that was “learned and meditative”, “romantic”, “all stone and hard on the outside” but also “softened by gardens on the inside”. Listening to this heart today, wondering like love-struck flâneurs amongst the streets and squares of some of the neighbourhoods that used to be suburban and working-class but are now under renovation, means trying to attune oneself to the variable voices, tensions and moods of those who live in a constant flow of social and cultural transformation. A colourful, working-class heart – a multicultural one, too, more recently – still vibrant with ancient memories, hurt by the harsh social differences yet nonetheless stirred by that special kind of hope that knows how to conceive and build positive changes. Then again, this is how Milan is – a kaleidoscope.
Let’s look at one of the many examples of this. NoLo (“North of Loreto”) is the ingenious new name given by a group of playful artists to a neighbourhood that, only a few years before, comprised the Gorla, Precotto and Turro areas, as well as the long straight streets heading north-east such as Via Padova and Viale Monza, and all the other roads running beyond Piazzale Loreto. A neighbourhood whose inhabitants, traditionally, were mainly factory workers, mechanicians and labourers, while now it features plenty of cafés and small eateries, cutting-edge cultural hubs, small squares saved from dilapidation, and gathering places where traditional residents mix with young artists and creative talents. It’s all very pop. So much so that it deserves its own “Guide”, part of a series published by newspaper la Repubblica and sold in bookshops and newsagents, listing the sites that are worth exploring.
NoLo shares its vibe with Milan. Because Milan always possessed a global vibe, as well as its own more intimate and discreet one. It’s an open, creative, strict yet welcoming city, as its own shape shows: round, with no corners, grown in concentric circles that, from the Navigli neighbourhood to its walls – the Mura Spagnole – and then to its ring roads, have absorbed hamlets and villages into itself, with the Duomo at the centre but looking outwards towards the world.
Milan on the go. After all, it never had barred gates meant to exclude, but toll houses to invite exchange and commerce, communication hubs, so that this city in the middle of a plain grew into a dynamic space through which people, ideas, goods, flowed, blending manufactures and cultures.
Its character has been unmistakable for a long time now, and it’s well summarised by the historic decree issued by the Archbishop of Milan Heribert of Ariberto, in 1018: “Those who know what work is come to Milan. And those who come to Milan are free people.” Work as an opportunity for personal and social growth, as a mark of citizenship, as an obvious token of freedom. A thousand years later, that decree is still echoing in conversations about Milan’s dynamic nature, in-between memories, the everyday and the future.
Work, indeed.
NoLo, before it acquired its new name, was a typical part of the industrial area of Milan, extending towards the manufacturing region of Brianza and bordering with the province of Bergamo – warehouse after warehouse, mainly developing northwards, interwoven with the Naviglio della Martesana canal, with its slow flow and bicycles on its bank. The Pirelli company in the Bicocca area, the Breda and Falck enterprises going towards Sesto San Giovanni. And, all around, a tangle of steelworks and chemical plants, workshops, warehouses, as well as factories and depots, smokestacks and railway tracks, a landscape featuring walls and machinery, beloved by painter Mario Sironi and engineer-cum-poet Leonardo Sinisgalli, born in Lucca yet Milan’s lovingly adopted son: “I enter a factory with my head uncovered, as if entering a cathedral, and I watch the movements of people and machinery as if they were part of a sacred rite… In these plants where people and machines bustle about works that always appear like a miracle: a metamorphosis.”
Metamorphosis. A word that accurately describes NoLo, too.
The huge factories are no longer there. The Bicocca area, following the projects accomplished by Vittorio Gregotti, now boasts a university with 35,000 students and a series of scientific research successes of international standing – a veritable “knowledge factory”. Nearby, office buildings, banks, publishing houses, the headquarters of multinational companies (Pirelli, Prysmian, Deutsche Bank, etc.) arise, as well as the HangarBicocca, one of the largest European centres for contemporary art, with “The seven heavenly palaces” by Anselm Kiefer and a schedule brimming with excellent exhibitions. The Sesto neighbourhood is no longer “Italy’s Stalingrad” but a residential and tertiary area. True, industry is still present, between the Monza and Brianza regions. In the city, however, is much less important than it used to be.
In NoLo, too, the metropolis is under transformation, it’s shedding its skin.
Refurbishing memories and building change.
Pensioners who still talk about the factory sirens that used to mark the time, about the fog, the taverns and eateries, are joined by new residents from all over the world, and, more recently, by a new wave of settlers – intellectuals, creative talents, young people who skilfully experiment with a different future.
Then again, this is what metropolises are: motion, transformation,
Milan was always driven by this, and it’s precisely these neighbourhoods that are able to renew themselves, that refuse to be just “suburbs” by choosing to breathe new life into their own squares, concocting new identities and getting renamed, which embody the city’s past while flying towards the future. Just as NoLo shows us, with a good dose of knowing irony. The human condition continues to be harsh, demanding, marked by hardship and hope, but it never gives up. Here, feelings retain a hopeful future.
A recent instance? BienNoLo, a contemporary art exhibition, a “neighbourhood Biennale” that brings avant-garde art to a wide, ordinary audience. An amusing, skilful interplay of installations, the images of colourful murals injecting new life into the time worn walls of old yards. Hybridisation. Regeneration. Imagination. Energy.
Another way to resume life, playfully yet earnestly. Then again, history teaches that even during the greatest crises, Milan’s recovery was always rekindled through culture.
Two words for Milan? “Small and gracious”, says Lucia Mascino during a break in the rehearsal of Smarrimento (Bewilderment) at the Teatro Franco Parenti theatre, directed by Lucia Calamaro; meantime, on the small screen, her starring role on the TV series Delitti del BarLume (Murders at BarLume), with Filippo Timi, is becoming increasingly more popular.
“Small and gracious” – two unusual terms for this metropolis that keeps on growing, investing, innovating, its cranes busy building ambitiously sumptuous neighbourhoods and high-tech companies, research centres and investment banks, luxury boutiques and fusion restaurants, in a turmoil of expanding wealth and new social issues, attractions and scary episodes of urban violence. Yet, in an incisive interview on la Repubblica (11 February), Mascini reiterates: “At first I was struck by its well-being, everyone seemed so clean, freshly showered and shampooed. Well-combed hair, scented – a bit too much perhaps. Then I changed my mind…”. Basically, “I don’t like the Milan that flaunts itself at the cocktail hour, but if you know it, you can avoid it.”
Lucia Mascino is a fine, intelligent and sensitive artist. She knows how to go beyond appearances, notices the discrepancies, explores the contradictions. And she’s deft at discerning beauty and gentleness beyond the city’s fragile trends and neurotic business deals that sharpen inequalities, at detecting the city’s ingrained traits, those that still distinguish it, that used to captivate Stendhal and, after him, generations of insightful intellectuals, artistic personalities, humanist bankers and well-educated entrepreneurs.
The message is clear – behind the skyscrapers’ thousand lights we can ultimately find a welcoming and inclusive, responsible and civil, metropolis. A metropolis we should get to know, understand and enrich, but also protect, to avoid it becoming too expensive, “a posh enclave”, a bubble of disproportionate wealth excluding young and creative people.
Reading about Milan only helps us understanding it better.
“I listen to your heart, city”, proclaimed with loving inquisitiveness Alberto Savinio during the first, thorny years of the 1940s, discovering a Milan that was “learned and meditative”, “romantic”, “all stone and hard on the outside” but also “softened by gardens on the inside”. Listening to this heart today, wondering like love-struck flâneurs amongst the streets and squares of some of the neighbourhoods that used to be suburban and working-class but are now under renovation, means trying to attune oneself to the variable voices, tensions and moods of those who live in a constant flow of social and cultural transformation. A colourful, working-class heart – a multicultural one, too, more recently – still vibrant with ancient memories, hurt by the harsh social differences yet nonetheless stirred by that special kind of hope that knows how to conceive and build positive changes. Then again, this is how Milan is – a kaleidoscope.
Let’s look at one of the many examples of this. NoLo (“North of Loreto”) is the ingenious new name given by a group of playful artists to a neighbourhood that, only a few years before, comprised the Gorla, Precotto and Turro areas, as well as the long straight streets heading north-east such as Via Padova and Viale Monza, and all the other roads running beyond Piazzale Loreto. A neighbourhood whose inhabitants, traditionally, were mainly factory workers, mechanicians and labourers, while now it features plenty of cafés and small eateries, cutting-edge cultural hubs, small squares saved from dilapidation, and gathering places where traditional residents mix with young artists and creative talents. It’s all very pop. So much so that it deserves its own “Guide”, part of a series published by newspaper la Repubblica and sold in bookshops and newsagents, listing the sites that are worth exploring.
NoLo shares its vibe with Milan. Because Milan always possessed a global vibe, as well as its own more intimate and discreet one. It’s an open, creative, strict yet welcoming city, as its own shape shows: round, with no corners, grown in concentric circles that, from the Navigli neighbourhood to its walls – the Mura Spagnole – and then to its ring roads, have absorbed hamlets and villages into itself, with the Duomo at the centre but looking outwards towards the world.
Milan on the go. After all, it never had barred gates meant to exclude, but toll houses to invite exchange and commerce, communication hubs, so that this city in the middle of a plain grew into a dynamic space through which people, ideas, goods, flowed, blending manufactures and cultures.
Its character has been unmistakable for a long time now, and it’s well summarised by the historic decree issued by the Archbishop of Milan Heribert of Ariberto, in 1018: “Those who know what work is come to Milan. And those who come to Milan are free people.” Work as an opportunity for personal and social growth, as a mark of citizenship, as an obvious token of freedom. A thousand years later, that decree is still echoing in conversations about Milan’s dynamic nature, in-between memories, the everyday and the future.
Work, indeed.
NoLo, before it acquired its new name, was a typical part of the industrial area of Milan, extending towards the manufacturing region of Brianza and bordering with the province of Bergamo – warehouse after warehouse, mainly developing northwards, interwoven with the Naviglio della Martesana canal, with its slow flow and bicycles on its bank. The Pirelli company in the Bicocca area, the Breda and Falck enterprises going towards Sesto San Giovanni. And, all around, a tangle of steelworks and chemical plants, workshops, warehouses, as well as factories and depots, smokestacks and railway tracks, a landscape featuring walls and machinery, beloved by painter Mario Sironi and engineer-cum-poet Leonardo Sinisgalli, born in Lucca yet Milan’s lovingly adopted son: “I enter a factory with my head uncovered, as if entering a cathedral, and I watch the movements of people and machinery as if they were part of a sacred rite… In these plants where people and machines bustle about works that always appear like a miracle: a metamorphosis.”
Metamorphosis. A word that accurately describes NoLo, too.
The huge factories are no longer there. The Bicocca area, following the projects accomplished by Vittorio Gregotti, now boasts a university with 35,000 students and a series of scientific research successes of international standing – a veritable “knowledge factory”. Nearby, office buildings, banks, publishing houses, the headquarters of multinational companies (Pirelli, Prysmian, Deutsche Bank, etc.) arise, as well as the HangarBicocca, one of the largest European centres for contemporary art, with “The seven heavenly palaces” by Anselm Kiefer and a schedule brimming with excellent exhibitions. The Sesto neighbourhood is no longer “Italy’s Stalingrad” but a residential and tertiary area. True, industry is still present, between the Monza and Brianza regions. In the city, however, is much less important than it used to be.
In NoLo, too, the metropolis is under transformation, it’s shedding its skin.
Refurbishing memories and building change.
Pensioners who still talk about the factory sirens that used to mark the time, about the fog, the taverns and eateries, are joined by new residents from all over the world, and, more recently, by a new wave of settlers – intellectuals, creative talents, young people who skilfully experiment with a different future.
Then again, this is what metropolises are: motion, transformation,
Milan was always driven by this, and it’s precisely these neighbourhoods that are able to renew themselves, that refuse to be just “suburbs” by choosing to breathe new life into their own squares, concocting new identities and getting renamed, which embody the city’s past while flying towards the future. Just as NoLo shows us, with a good dose of knowing irony. The human condition continues to be harsh, demanding, marked by hardship and hope, but it never gives up. Here, feelings retain a hopeful future.
A recent instance? BienNoLo, a contemporary art exhibition, a “neighbourhood Biennale” that brings avant-garde art to a wide, ordinary audience. An amusing, skilful interplay of installations, the images of colourful murals injecting new life into the time worn walls of old yards. Hybridisation. Regeneration. Imagination. Energy.
Another way to resume life, playfully yet earnestly. Then again, history teaches that even during the greatest crises, Milan’s recovery was always rekindled through culture.