Milan is anything but violent and “out of control”, but the growing divides need supportive answers
Milan, namely the most expensive shopping street in the world – Montenapoleone – with its annual commercial rent of 20,000 euros per square metre (more than Upper 5th Avenue in New York, New Bond Street in London, or Tsim Sha Tsui in Hong Kong) and with a 30% increase in two years. Wealth, opulent consumption, high fashion.
Milan, namely Corvetto – an outlying area full of social tension and heated protests, concerns about work and income, hardships linked to the difficult integration of the new generations and the fears of the elderly.
But can Milan really only be described like this, with these extreme summaries derived from the news reports of late November, with the focus on the dramatic economic and social divides, on the one hand the thousand lights of luxury and on the other the dark and painful night of those who struggle to make a living?
Of course not. Now that the dust has settled on the controversy over the “Corvetto revolt” or the “Corvetto powder keg” (the phrases most widely used in the media, after the death of the young Ramy Elgam while a scooter was being pursued by a police car), it’s worth trying to get a better understanding of the most obvious aspects and the deep roots of the economic and social developments affecting the metropolis (perhaps also speaking of “regression”) and the indications that can be drawn from a series of phenomena that call into question not only politics and the public administration but also civil society, economic forces and culture.
“Cities, like dreams, are built of desires and fears, even though the thread of their discourse is secret, their perspectives deceitful, and every single thing hides another” wrote Italo Calvino in 1972, more than half a century ago. In an imaginary dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, he put down on the page eleven series of “invisible cities” and reasoned about memory, desires, signs, exchanges, names, eyes, “subtle”, “continuous”, “hidden” urban spaces, and much more besides. It was a love poem for those places where, even then (but now more and more intensely) a composite humanity gathers and where it’s necessary to come to terms with a difficult, controversial and – why not? – contradictory modernity (after all, contradicting means “containing multitudes” according to Walt Whitman’s keen poetic intuition).
As is the case in all love stories, Calvin highlighted the expectations, illusions, disappointments, luminous happiness and sharp pains of betrayal and abandonment. And yet, as in any game of intelligence and will, he gave us a glimpse of the desire to understand and the need to intervene. At various levels. Reason. And feelings. Because, remembering Blaise Pascal, the heart has reasons that reason doesn’t know.
Try to understand, then. And investigate, research, explore. Calvino again: “You don’t relish the seven or seventy-seven wonders of a city, but the answer it gives to your question.”
So what are we asking of Milan today? To be in any case faithful (even in the heart of radical, impetuous transformations) to the ability to hold together personal resourcefulness and social values, productivity and inclusion, economic competitiveness and solidarity. To pay attention to money. And to have a sincerely compassionate view. Wealth and measure, elegance, precision. Success. And a good open, creative culture. A special blend of capitalism and reformism, market and general interests. Milan, in short, as a paradigm of how the European synthesis between democracy, market and welfare can be effectively manifested.
Precisely because of this special “social capital”, for long periods of history it’s been clear that “you become Milanese” even though you may have come from Parma or Palermo, Treviso or Bari, Florence or Naples, or from one of the many less dynamic Italian municipalities, to learn (precisely through business and work) to be producers and, above all, citizens. A secular religion (frequently found in Catholic circles too) of “doing, doing well and doing some good”. The “city that goes up” and that, in fact, includes.
Things have changed in recent times though. The economic and social divides have grown, as Il Giorno clearly laid out (24th November), showing “the two faces of Milan” with “the income abyss, five times higher in the city centre” compared with the outskirts such as Quarto Oggiaro, and with an increase in “poor workers” and temporary workers. And in Corriere della Sera (21st November), Giangiacomo Schiavi – a scrupulous analyst of community data, feelings and opinions – recounted the predicament for quality of life and happiness “without five thousand euros a month”. And three days later (24th November), he insisted: “In the Milan of appeal and events, there’s poverty made up of lives running at the minimum, of people who try to climb the social ladder but can’t manage it. These are stories that contradict the vision of an equal citizenship status: stories of invisible men and women overwhelmed by emergencies, detached from civil life and hiding in the shame of something over a plate of soup in the canteens of Ambrosian solidarity”.
And then La Repubblica (17th November): “A drop in new residents: the high cost of living weighs on the farewell to Milan”. In 2024 in fact (data up to August), 50,000 people left the city, compared with 35,000 new arrivals. One cause is a surge in the cost of living that far outweighs the increase in salaries and average wages. And these trends are negatively dominated by the crippling boom in real estate values: “Rents up by 40% over the space of five years. Behind the new poverty lies the cost of housing”, writes Zita Dazzi in La Repubblica (24th November), using data taken from research by the Bicocca University for the Pellegrini Foundation.
A key point: thanks to the 2017 Renzi law on the 100,000 euro flat tax (raised to 200,000 euros by the Meloni government last August), about 1,600 super-rich chose to live in Italy (and especially in Milan) rather than in London or other large international cities, driving first of all the real estate market crazy. And Italy “has become a tax haven on a par with Switzerland” says Ferruccio de Bortoli (Corriere della Sera, 2nd December).
Social inequalities are increasing in a Milan crowded with wealthy city users and less and less by citizens with a life plan, a love for spaces, services and common values (including culture) and strict attention to the quality of life in general, from health to school, from security to neighbourhood relationships.
In short, Milan needs to re-read Alberto Savinio‘s intense pages, “listen to your heart, city”. And to defer less to the allure of the stage of fashion and consumption, instead dedicating more attention to the real economy, to salaries, to projects for young people, to solidarity. Rediscovering its Ambrosian soul, in fact.
So everything’s wrong and needs to be redone then? No, of course not.
Milan is a multiple, multifaceted city, strengthened by the many differences within it and by a culture of active citizenship that’s still solid (though now showing signs of cracks and woodworm). And so it must be recounted well in all its complexity, and administered with generous foresight.
Milan, as we know, is hypercritical of itself. Demanding. Marked by an ethic of work and common good that still has firm roots (Verri, Beccaria, Manzoni, Cattaneo) and emerges in current enterprises (the lesson of the great entrepreneurial families – Pirelli, Bocconi, Falck, Borletti – is still echoing and is being re-interpreted by the new generations of entrepreneurs of the real economy). It’s still acutely sensitive to excessive disparities and intolerable inefficiencies with social repercussions. A virtue. That shouldn’t be mortified.
That’s why the brief yet alarming texts on extreme phenomena are wrong, giving the idea that we’re dealing with a city out of control. And the fleeting judgements about success and the rapid accumulation of wealth are equally misleading. Milan has an extraordinary complexity that still needs to be carefully understood, revealed and accentuated.
In the metropolitan story, therefore, the initiatives designed by the Municipality for social housing can emerge, keeping in mind the rights and expectations of the 200,000 university students – the good future of Milan. The growth of Mind (Milan Innovation District) in the area where, almost ten years ago, the World Expo marked the recovery of the city to the point of it becoming a symbol – “the place to be”, according to the New York Times. La Scala, which opens the season with the “premiere” on 7th December, the feast day of Saint Ambrose, for spectators in 37 different parts of the city, from the Gallery to San Vittore and to the big screens set up on the outskirts of the city, because good culture is popular and for everyone. Assolombarda (association of Lombardy businesses), which inaugurates an in-house nursery school open to the neighbourhood, as an incentive for all its registered companies to do the same. And the Museum of Science and Technology that sets up a new Playlab for children, so they can learn while playing.
The Milanese newspaper reports of good economic and social practices offer several examples, together with investigations into everything that’s wrong.
In short, Milan is a multi-faceted city. That you have to know how to interpret. And – why not? – strictly continue to love.
“Milan needs more integration and a stop to gloom and doom” says Archbishop Mario Delpini: “Outside the sparkling centre there are districts with economic problems, but they’re not ghettos. There’s a need for dialogue and hospitality there” (La Repubblica, 29th November). And Donatella Sciuto, rector of the Polytechnic – a university of international importance and prestige (La Repubblica, 30th November), invites us to “mend the city”, “to make proximity heard, to make the various pieces of Milan communicate with each other”, recalling that she inaugurated student halls of residence last year, precisely in Corvetto. Where “the voices of reality that build bridges” work: the Community of Sant’Egidio, the sisters of Via Martinengo, a series of cooperatives and social centres. To “work together on inclusion”, Sciuto adds. Without exacerbating the conflicts.
If this is the context, of social problems and wounds but also of commitment and generous thoughts, it’s worth looking beyond the news articles. And, for example, continuing to read Calvin, right up to the last pages of “The Infinite Cities”: “The hell of living people isn’t something in the future; if there is one, it’s already here. It’s the hell we live in every day, which we form by staying together. There are two ways not to suffer from it. The first comes easy to many: accept hell and become part of it, to the point where you don’t see it any more. The second is risky and requires continuous attention and learning: look for and recognise who and what, in the middle of hell, isn’t hell, and make it last, and give them space”.
Milan, namely the most expensive shopping street in the world – Montenapoleone – with its annual commercial rent of 20,000 euros per square metre (more than Upper 5th Avenue in New York, New Bond Street in London, or Tsim Sha Tsui in Hong Kong) and with a 30% increase in two years. Wealth, opulent consumption, high fashion.
Milan, namely Corvetto – an outlying area full of social tension and heated protests, concerns about work and income, hardships linked to the difficult integration of the new generations and the fears of the elderly.
But can Milan really only be described like this, with these extreme summaries derived from the news reports of late November, with the focus on the dramatic economic and social divides, on the one hand the thousand lights of luxury and on the other the dark and painful night of those who struggle to make a living?
Of course not. Now that the dust has settled on the controversy over the “Corvetto revolt” or the “Corvetto powder keg” (the phrases most widely used in the media, after the death of the young Ramy Elgam while a scooter was being pursued by a police car), it’s worth trying to get a better understanding of the most obvious aspects and the deep roots of the economic and social developments affecting the metropolis (perhaps also speaking of “regression”) and the indications that can be drawn from a series of phenomena that call into question not only politics and the public administration but also civil society, economic forces and culture.
“Cities, like dreams, are built of desires and fears, even though the thread of their discourse is secret, their perspectives deceitful, and every single thing hides another” wrote Italo Calvino in 1972, more than half a century ago. In an imaginary dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, he put down on the page eleven series of “invisible cities” and reasoned about memory, desires, signs, exchanges, names, eyes, “subtle”, “continuous”, “hidden” urban spaces, and much more besides. It was a love poem for those places where, even then (but now more and more intensely) a composite humanity gathers and where it’s necessary to come to terms with a difficult, controversial and – why not? – contradictory modernity (after all, contradicting means “containing multitudes” according to Walt Whitman’s keen poetic intuition).
As is the case in all love stories, Calvin highlighted the expectations, illusions, disappointments, luminous happiness and sharp pains of betrayal and abandonment. And yet, as in any game of intelligence and will, he gave us a glimpse of the desire to understand and the need to intervene. At various levels. Reason. And feelings. Because, remembering Blaise Pascal, the heart has reasons that reason doesn’t know.
Try to understand, then. And investigate, research, explore. Calvino again: “You don’t relish the seven or seventy-seven wonders of a city, but the answer it gives to your question.”
So what are we asking of Milan today? To be in any case faithful (even in the heart of radical, impetuous transformations) to the ability to hold together personal resourcefulness and social values, productivity and inclusion, economic competitiveness and solidarity. To pay attention to money. And to have a sincerely compassionate view. Wealth and measure, elegance, precision. Success. And a good open, creative culture. A special blend of capitalism and reformism, market and general interests. Milan, in short, as a paradigm of how the European synthesis between democracy, market and welfare can be effectively manifested.
Precisely because of this special “social capital”, for long periods of history it’s been clear that “you become Milanese” even though you may have come from Parma or Palermo, Treviso or Bari, Florence or Naples, or from one of the many less dynamic Italian municipalities, to learn (precisely through business and work) to be producers and, above all, citizens. A secular religion (frequently found in Catholic circles too) of “doing, doing well and doing some good”. The “city that goes up” and that, in fact, includes.
Things have changed in recent times though. The economic and social divides have grown, as Il Giorno clearly laid out (24th November), showing “the two faces of Milan” with “the income abyss, five times higher in the city centre” compared with the outskirts such as Quarto Oggiaro, and with an increase in “poor workers” and temporary workers. And in Corriere della Sera (21st November), Giangiacomo Schiavi – a scrupulous analyst of community data, feelings and opinions – recounted the predicament for quality of life and happiness “without five thousand euros a month”. And three days later (24th November), he insisted: “In the Milan of appeal and events, there’s poverty made up of lives running at the minimum, of people who try to climb the social ladder but can’t manage it. These are stories that contradict the vision of an equal citizenship status: stories of invisible men and women overwhelmed by emergencies, detached from civil life and hiding in the shame of something over a plate of soup in the canteens of Ambrosian solidarity”.
And then La Repubblica (17th November): “A drop in new residents: the high cost of living weighs on the farewell to Milan”. In 2024 in fact (data up to August), 50,000 people left the city, compared with 35,000 new arrivals. One cause is a surge in the cost of living that far outweighs the increase in salaries and average wages. And these trends are negatively dominated by the crippling boom in real estate values: “Rents up by 40% over the space of five years. Behind the new poverty lies the cost of housing”, writes Zita Dazzi in La Repubblica (24th November), using data taken from research by the Bicocca University for the Pellegrini Foundation.
A key point: thanks to the 2017 Renzi law on the 100,000 euro flat tax (raised to 200,000 euros by the Meloni government last August), about 1,600 super-rich chose to live in Italy (and especially in Milan) rather than in London or other large international cities, driving first of all the real estate market crazy. And Italy “has become a tax haven on a par with Switzerland” says Ferruccio de Bortoli (Corriere della Sera, 2nd December).
Social inequalities are increasing in a Milan crowded with wealthy city users and less and less by citizens with a life plan, a love for spaces, services and common values (including culture) and strict attention to the quality of life in general, from health to school, from security to neighbourhood relationships.
In short, Milan needs to re-read Alberto Savinio‘s intense pages, “listen to your heart, city”. And to defer less to the allure of the stage of fashion and consumption, instead dedicating more attention to the real economy, to salaries, to projects for young people, to solidarity. Rediscovering its Ambrosian soul, in fact.
So everything’s wrong and needs to be redone then? No, of course not.
Milan is a multiple, multifaceted city, strengthened by the many differences within it and by a culture of active citizenship that’s still solid (though now showing signs of cracks and woodworm). And so it must be recounted well in all its complexity, and administered with generous foresight.
Milan, as we know, is hypercritical of itself. Demanding. Marked by an ethic of work and common good that still has firm roots (Verri, Beccaria, Manzoni, Cattaneo) and emerges in current enterprises (the lesson of the great entrepreneurial families – Pirelli, Bocconi, Falck, Borletti – is still echoing and is being re-interpreted by the new generations of entrepreneurs of the real economy). It’s still acutely sensitive to excessive disparities and intolerable inefficiencies with social repercussions. A virtue. That shouldn’t be mortified.
That’s why the brief yet alarming texts on extreme phenomena are wrong, giving the idea that we’re dealing with a city out of control. And the fleeting judgements about success and the rapid accumulation of wealth are equally misleading. Milan has an extraordinary complexity that still needs to be carefully understood, revealed and accentuated.
In the metropolitan story, therefore, the initiatives designed by the Municipality for social housing can emerge, keeping in mind the rights and expectations of the 200,000 university students – the good future of Milan. The growth of Mind (Milan Innovation District) in the area where, almost ten years ago, the World Expo marked the recovery of the city to the point of it becoming a symbol – “the place to be”, according to the New York Times. La Scala, which opens the season with the “premiere” on 7th December, the feast day of Saint Ambrose, for spectators in 37 different parts of the city, from the Gallery to San Vittore and to the big screens set up on the outskirts of the city, because good culture is popular and for everyone. Assolombarda (association of Lombardy businesses), which inaugurates an in-house nursery school open to the neighbourhood, as an incentive for all its registered companies to do the same. And the Museum of Science and Technology that sets up a new Playlab for children, so they can learn while playing.
The Milanese newspaper reports of good economic and social practices offer several examples, together with investigations into everything that’s wrong.
In short, Milan is a multi-faceted city. That you have to know how to interpret. And – why not? – strictly continue to love.
“Milan needs more integration and a stop to gloom and doom” says Archbishop Mario Delpini: “Outside the sparkling centre there are districts with economic problems, but they’re not ghettos. There’s a need for dialogue and hospitality there” (La Repubblica, 29th November). And Donatella Sciuto, rector of the Polytechnic – a university of international importance and prestige (La Repubblica, 30th November), invites us to “mend the city”, “to make proximity heard, to make the various pieces of Milan communicate with each other”, recalling that she inaugurated student halls of residence last year, precisely in Corvetto. Where “the voices of reality that build bridges” work: the Community of Sant’Egidio, the sisters of Via Martinengo, a series of cooperatives and social centres. To “work together on inclusion”, Sciuto adds. Without exacerbating the conflicts.
If this is the context, of social problems and wounds but also of commitment and generous thoughts, it’s worth looking beyond the news articles. And, for example, continuing to read Calvin, right up to the last pages of “The Infinite Cities”: “The hell of living people isn’t something in the future; if there is one, it’s already here. It’s the hell we live in every day, which we form by staying together. There are two ways not to suffer from it. The first comes easy to many: accept hell and become part of it, to the point where you don’t see it any more. The second is risky and requires continuous attention and learning: look for and recognise who and what, in the middle of hell, isn’t hell, and make it last, and give them space”.