In 1881, Giovanni Verga defined Milan as ‘la città più città d'Italia’ (‘Italy's most urban city’). A statement of some significance, as at that time Rome and Turin could each legitimately claim to have much greater political if not economic clout. Almost one and a half centuries later, the role of the capitale morale as the pulsing heart of a country incessantly searching for both a modern national identity and a city-centred narrative remains unchallenged, as proved by two books straddling cultural history, personal memoir and current affairs.
Alberto Saibene is the acclaimed author of recent books on Adriano Olivetti and Fondo per l'Ambiente Italiano (FAI). His studies shed light on the contribution of the Italian haute bourgeoisie (of which he himself is part) to the country's modernisation and more particularly on the role of culture in this still partly unfinished journey. Milano fine Novecento. Storie, luoghi e personaggi di una città che non c’è più is a further piece of this puzzle, with Saibene playing his own role as a young but nonetheless curious and conscious spectator. The picture that emerges is one of a city that in the 1960s and 1970s was fully integrated into the global circuit through its heroes (artists, architects, illustrators, graphic designers) and institutions (publishing houses like Emme Edizioni, corporations like Rinascente, theatres like Piccolo and Lirico). A fabulous place which no longer exists, ‘una città che non c’è più’ (‘a city that is no more’), having been replaced by homegrown oligarchs (not Saibene's expression, but my interpretation of the likes of Silvio Berlusconi and his coterie) living in huge mansions devoid of the magic buon gusto of yesteryear.
There is little doubt that figures like Paolo Grassi, Giorgio Strehler, Enzo Mari, Ettore Sottsass, Piero Fornasetti, Bruno Munari and many others, including the largely-ignored Giancarlo Iliprandi, whose autobiography Saibene published with Hoepli in 2015, were both central to Milan public life and well-connected internationally. This is attested to by the pictures taken by Carla Cerati which enrich the book and were originally included in Mondo Cocktail (1974), showing a sort of Swinging London alla milanese. These images show a social melting pot involving the local ruling class (families like the Dubinis, Gavazzis and Castellinis) and up-and-coming talent, quite often immigrants from the rest of Italy (like Strehler) or abroad (like Innsbruck-born Sottsass or the Argentinean Tomás Maldonado).
The risks in painting the past too rosily are twofold. The first is omitting or minimising the limits of that fortunate experience, whose sole legacy is seemingly Milano da bere, with its fashion designers, consumption boom and Berlusconi's TV shows. On the one hand, quite a few evocative names from the Fine Novecento season did in fact adhere to the Socialist Party's vision of a new Milan capable of synthesising new elements, which eventually became the City of Bribes (Tangentopoli). On the other hand, in the 1980s the city had developed new symbols of its new post-Fordist identity, with the same ‘joy and optimism’ (to quote the back cover) that characterised the previous period. In this setting, highbrow culture was left, right and centre: suffice to mention that the Giorgio Armani portrait that featured on the cover page of Time magazine in April 1982 now belongs to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
The second risk is underplaying the changes, most of them positive, that have occurred in Milan since the mid-2000s and that have contributed to the emergence of an eco-system that, mutatis mutandis, is similar to the dream-like one that Saibene describes. The list of new institutions is long, and to name but a few it includes Mudec, Hangar Bicocca, the via Tortona design district, and Fondazione Prada. Bocconi, once the reserve of spoiled local kids (as seen on the Drive In TV show), is now one of the leading economics and management universities in Europe, with a truly global faculty and student body. The same can be said of la Triennale, an austere institution which, under the leadership of Stefano Boeri, is now open to all kinds of diverse artistic influences, including science. Indeed, the active and almost massive presence of foreign talent, from Brera director James Bradburne to La Scala Superintendente Dominique Meyer, testifies to the continuing centrality of Milano on global circuits. One can be more provocative and include Chiara Ferragni, the Milanese influencer whose success does help to understand the world we live in and the new contours of popular culture much better than most convoluted academic scholarship.
Buildings are not central to Saibene's story, although the difficulties in completing a specific one, Zanuso's new Piccolo Teatro, are presented as emblematic of the decline of Milano. They are, obviously, at the very centre of Milano Moderna. Architettura, arte e città 1947–2021, a new edition of the 1996 classic, which focused on the postwar reconstruction years and had long been out of print. The book is edited by Fulvio Irace and has some splendid photos by Gabriele Basilico, Paolo Rosselli, Marco Introini, Filippo Romano and Giovanna Silva.
The original book, published by Federico Motta, had the merit of bringing back from oblivion a group of architects and their practices, including Luigi Moretti, Asnago e Vender, Giò Ponti, Vico Magistretti, Giulio Minoletti, Giuseppe Chiodi, Lodovico Lanza and Luigi Caccia Dominioni, by-passed by academic scholars as insufficiently attentive to the social dimension of their production, a fiercely ideological reading that is now out of fashion. On the contrary, it is widely agreed that they had found in the so-called Condominio Milanese the engineering and aesthetic response to the pressing housing needs of the Miracolo Economico, assisted in this endeavour by world-class artists like Lucio Fontana and Arnaldo Pomodoro. Interestingly, more complex architectural works like the Gallaratese by Carlo Aymonino and Aldo Rossi are now revalued from the perspective of users and found wanting.
Since the new Il Sole 24 Ore edition extends this analysis over the past 25 years, corresponding to the triumph of the ‘archi-stars’, it places the 1950s–70s generation in the global debate on buildings, space, people and the environment. The Milanese are allegedly show-offs and yet few seem to realise that their city is a possibly unmatched open-air museum of contemporary architecture. No fewer than eight laureates of the Pritzker Architecture Prize have worked in Milan, including the Swiss Herzog & de Meuron (Fondazione Feltrinelli), the Irish Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects (Campus Bocconi) and the Dutch Rem Koolhaas (Fondazione Prada). Regardless of subjective appreciation, they have managed to create a new landscape which is neither a spacecraft with no attachment to the urban past, nor yet a simple bookish rejuvenation, a Milanese style that is both internationalist without being coldly rootless and genuine without being naively nativist. The Lombard metropolis is indeed confronted with the same challenges, inter alia preserving the genius loci, using buildings both to attract new investments and to house and shelter dwellers and workers, avoiding the complete ‘financialisation’ of construction projects, as any other global city.
Saibene seems unconvinced by this desire to reach the top of the profession when launching new projects and is critical of the ancillary role played by Italian architects and dismissive of the work of those, like Stefano Boeri, who participated in this building drive (in an interview, he noted that the celebrated Bosco Verticale ‘is not even a skyscraper’). And yet there can be no doubt that competition with foreign masters, no less than cooperation with them on specific tasks and even ‘breathing the same air’, has helped a new generation of Milanese professionals grow and gain international recognition. Examples include Kuehn Malvezzi, PARK Associati and Progetto CMR.
These two books are bound to become essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Milan in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Irace and authors, employing a jargon that is sometimes excessively complex (at least in the humble opinion of an economist!) succeed in covering 75 years of urban transformation in its most material form – stones and cement, steel and glass, wires and wood. Saibene is both more emotional in his description of Milano through tainted lenses and more encyclopedic in his coverage; the name index runs to nine pages and 692 entries, although, as Giuseppe Frangi noted in Il Manifesto (16 January 2022), as crucial a figure as Giovanni Testori is not included. Another, possibly less revealing, absence is that of Demetrio Stratos, the frontman of the band Area who collaborated with John Cage and Merce Cunningham and died aged 34 in 1979; that a street in the City Life area is named after a Greek-Italian experimental musician is the best testimony of Verga's correct intuition.
