Seventy years ago, close to the wide-open square of what is now called Piazzale Lugano in the Milanese inner-suburb of Bovisa, there were extensive plots where raspberries were grown. Women wearing baskets around their necks would pick them by hand. The fruit would be washed, sorted and put into large containers. Every morning carts would transport the fruit to Sesto San Giovanni, an industrial zone to the north-west of the city. There, the raspberries were used by the Campari firm – which had (and still has) its main factory in Sesto – to produce the famous red colour in Bitter Campari, an aperitif drunk all over the world.

Then, in about 1935, the unexpected happened. In the USA an insect – a kind of ladybird – was discovered which produced the same kind of red at a far lesser cost. The raspberries from Bovisa were abandoned. Their production collapsed. Soon, the land was sold off to industrialists or housing-speculators. Now, few traces of that production remain, beyond the memories of some older residents of the zone. The area where fertile fields produced raspberries is now a mixture of abandoned factories, toxic waste, rubbish, roads, signs, faceless 1950s housing blocks and a seedy strip joint. It is almost unbelievable, surreal no less, to imagine the production of raspberries there. As with Tindall's Kentish Town, transformation had been so fast that ‘childhood memories had assumed the quality of an improbable dream’. Yet, this was not 200 years ago, but a moment in living memory, an active part of Milan's recent past. As a result, one of the only ways to explore this history of the recent past – now largely obliterated from the landscape – is through interviews with those who remember that past.

This article, based on material gathered during a four-year collective research project financed by the AHRC, aims to discuss and unpack some of the links between living memories and traces of the past in a key zone in the history of Milan and, it should be added, of Italy. I will first outline the methodological background to the project, before discussing some themes that have emerged from the research.

Methodologies: the project, oral history

This research project has used a variety of means to analyse the links between memory and place in an ex-industrial neighbourhood. The first and most important research tool has been the use of oral history interviews. Oral history is now a well-established part of historical methodology, which has moved into the mainstream from its radical origins of the 1960s and 1970s. In that decade, Portelli wrote, in a famous article, about ‘the spectre of oral history’ that was haunting the academy.Footnote ⁴ Nearly 30 years on, his warning has largely been confirmed. Oral history is the touchstone for a series of inter-disciplinary activities that range far beyond university classrooms into museums, public projects and film documentaries and across the Internet. As an academic discipline, oral history is now taken very seriously and has migrated into ‘classical’ history at a number of levels.

Much methodological debate in oral history centres on the role of the interview – expressly designed to collect historical material. Unlike other historians, an oral historian produces his or her own sources, in most cases (although some have worked on the interviews of others). There are a number of variants on this theme. The importance of inter-subjectivity has encouraged further reflection on the role of the interviewer – so the material collected is sometimes seen as less important than the processes of collection, and its effects on the interviewer. Interviewing implies a relationship between interviewer and interviewee – it is a necessarily relational process. A second key element of oral history consists in its unique nature as a means to understand memory. As Frisch has written:

Oral history thus brings history and the subject together. A further feature of oral history, which does not always emerge in oral histories, is the role of the spoken word and its relationship to text. Much of this issue is being transformed by the use of new technologies, and the deconstruction of ‘the book’ as the most authoritative means of disseminating historical analysis. However, a strong feature of the work of oral historians involves the desire to bring history alive through the voices of ordinary people. This is usually done through citation, the employment of quotes, the use of specific languages and dialects. An extraordinary example of this kind of work has been the Milan-based research into the memory of the city's stock floor traders – whose jobs were eliminated by technology in the 1990s. These traders had built up an elaborate language of gestures, signs and words in order to communicate on the stock floor. This ‘lost world’, captured in interviews, film and through a series of articles and analyses – only comes alive in the tales told by the ex-traders, who formed a tight-knit (and very powerful) community in twentieth-century Milan.Footnote ⁶

Oral history is not just about memory, but also about ifs and buts, utopias, missed opportunities, invention, the imaginary – it is a history of betrayals, dreams and desires. Interviewees will often muse about where they and where history went wrong, and they will write themselves into that history, move events around to fit certain more coherent versions of their story, or develop memories which coagulate around certain key stereotypes, commonplace stories and iconic images, photographs or films. Interviewees are not another kind of source but a completely different form of source. They help us, to paraphrase Susan Sontag writing about Walter Benjamin, to understand the past, not to uncover it, to ‘condense it into its spatial forms’.Footnote ⁷ Benjamin argued that ‘recollection means precisely the “re collection” of impressions of a fragmented and scattered experience and their reconstruction as a meaningful narrative that seeks in its own imperfect way to assume the dimensions of a social and psychological totality’.Footnote ⁸ Historians cannot, Benjamin argues, describe the past ‘as it really was’.Footnote ⁹ ‘History is always seen through the eyes of the present.’Footnote ¹⁰

This particular research project has concentrated on residents of a particular neighbourhood and a specific apartment block within that neighbourhood. 25 interviews were carried out over the period of the project's life with some interviews being conducted twice or even three times in order to allow concentration on specific themes or narratives. The interviewees ranged from older residents of the block – in their seventies and eighties – through to those who lived there in the 1950s and 1960s, right up to the new generation of residents and some children who have lived, or still do live, in flats in the block. Most of the interviews were filmed and all were recorded and transcribed. Some interviews were carried out collectively – others were individual, one-to-one interviews. Most participants were interviewed in their own homes, although others were taken to the house in order to link their memories with the physical space of the block. The interviews were filmed and a 53-minute documentary was later edited around various themes that emerged from the research. The film itself is now part of the story – having taken on an interactive role in the link between place and memory in the house itself, and the neighbourhood. During filming and after filming residents and interviewees took on an increasingly active role in the process. They contributed to their own understanding of the past. A resident and participant in the film wrote the music based on a first set of rushes. Piazzale Lugano, 22 began to write its own history. I – the historian – began to lose control. It was an interesting feeling.Footnote ¹¹

All of the interviews were carried out by the author of this article. Moreover, this house was a place where I lived for some years and many of the people interviewed are personal friends or relatives. Inter-subjectivity, as identified by Passerini in her work on 1968, is also an important part of this work.Footnote ¹² In oral history in particular – but I would argue in all research experience – the historian cannot simply be removed from the process of interpretation and understanding. Levels of inter-subjectivity vary from project to project. In this case, I was both insider (as ex-resident, as relative, as friend, as someone with an intimate knowledge of the apartment block, as historian) and outsider (as non-Italian, above all, but also as ex-resident). This inter-subjectivity manifests itself within the project in various ways – in the form and content of the interviews for example (their relaxed nature has been commented on by other historians) but also through a particular link to the details of the place itself. Thus, the story of this housing block is also an autobiographical one.

Methodologies: locations, micro-history

This is a work of urban history, which utilizes a series of methods to try and understand Milan over the last 50 years. Above all, this article applies micro-historical methods. The particular, the everyday and the ordinary are used to try and explain the general, the extraordinary and the exceptional. The scale of research is reduced to a housing block, individual life stories, families, events and places. Milan is a complicated and complex city, as are all cities, with a long and rich past. These micro-histories do not replace the big picture or a wider analysis, but are part of the whole story. This is never an automatic process – a series of micro-histories do not necessarily make a macro-history. Smaller stories need to be interpreted, drawn together and compared. Some of this work is descriptive, but no less historical for that. The historian often benefits from playing the role of reporter, or even detective. Clues, small signs and traces can be as important as broad trends and planned monuments. Non-events can mean as much as real ones. The lack of protest can tell us as much as 10 years of street demonstrations. As Dyos wrote, ‘to be well-informed about this whole changeable landscape the topographer has to have an eye both for what is now and for what will shortly cease to be’.Footnote ¹⁴

Narration and description have always played a key role in historical explanation and these techniques have recently begun to take on more credibility in conjunction with other methodologies and alternative sources. Yet, ‘no description is neutral’ and ‘the reporting of concrete facts is a way of understanding the real functioning of society . . . which otherwise would end up as simplified or distorted by quantitative calculations or excessive generalization’.Footnote ¹⁵ This type of practice has a long tradition within urban history and urban anthropology – such as with the approach of Dyos or that of Hannerz, who both advocated the ‘walking of the streets’ as a key methodological tool.Footnote ¹⁶

Born as a radical alternative to big, schematic historical methodologies, whereby history moved along straight, ideologically defined, teological tracks, micro-history is interested in everyday life – and as such also links up with the rich work of the German altag (everyday life) school – and entails the breaking-down of disciplinary boundaries. As such, micro-history allies itself with anthropological methods of study, as well as ethnography. It also rejects the old hierarchies and the old categories – and thus links well with oral history. As Portelli has put it ‘the death of an obscure factory worker in an obscure industrial town is a historical fact of great significance and deep implications’.Footnote ¹⁷ In this particular study, given my own links with both the place of study and the object of the research, I have, to cite Saraceno, ‘combined participant observation and survey methods, paying attention to the physical environment where daily life is located and where familial and kinship relationships take place’.Footnote ¹⁸

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the architect Ugo La Pietra carried out a number of research trips into the Milanese urban periphery. ‘The city’, he wrote, ‘was my territory.’ In his visits to and walks around allotments, public housing projects and wasteland, he took photographs, drew maps and interviewed inhabitants or users of space. He called these trips ‘urban safaris’ on which he came across ‘routes, obstacles, signs, ruins, traces, beauty, dangers and adventures’.Footnote ¹⁹ During his safaris, he discovered numerous ‘models of micro-behaviour’ that revealed levels of individual and collective participation in the growth of the city. Space was often liberated, modified or reclaimed through these tiny interventions in the city, which went totally unnoticed by most academic research.Footnote ²⁰ ‘Every urban space’, wrote La Pietra in 1971, ‘has its own history . . . stories of people, of facts, of good and bad events, of accidents – all things which pavements and street signs cannot tell us about.’Footnote ²¹

Part of this project has been based on numerous urban safaris around the Milanese periphery and in particular the area known as Bovisa, armed with a camera and notebook. By walking these streets, time and time again, or by riding through them on a bicycle, I have been able to discover more and more details about this complicated space, and to map the changes that occur on an almost daily basis. This methodology has also been inspired by the work of the historians and others around the short-lived but influential review Altrochemestre. In a kind of manifesto of the methodologies used in that periodical, Luca Pes wrote of historians who ‘go to the source, open their eyes, watch and observe places which they previously did not know or took for granted’ who ‘tried to feel like foreigners in the place where they were born’.Footnote ²² Pes and others also argued that historians should ‘start with the present’. His group of ‘present-day historians’ was able to analyse with some verve, and in some detail, the changes to the contemporary city in the Veneto in a situation where the landscape had been transformed in such a way as to be almost unrecognizable.Footnote ²³

Methodologies: historical archaeology, ethnography, cultural anthropology

Comments on an earlier version of this article led me towards a series of other methodologies that have strong links with those I have employed in this work. Historical archaeologists have carried out a number of wide-ranging projects that look to understand the past of urban neighbourhoods through excavations and the analysis of material culture. Examples of this kind of work include the Cypress Replacement Project based in post-earthquake San Francisco in the 1990s. Archaeologists excavated large areas of an ex-working-class neighbourhood, producing an extraordinary series of reports on their findings. I am not aware of any such work in the Italian urban context. Bovisa would be an excellent site for this kind of research. Clearly, this type of methodology has relevance for my study of the apartment block, and excavations would almost certainly reveal items and objects linked to memories and to the past that would enrich the analysis included herein. Projects such as that in Oakland explicitly call for the material analysis of the past to be combined with oral history. They also use micro-history without calling it by that name. The oral history within this research is the least convincing part of the project – with oral history seemingly characterized as an extra and information-based series of contributions, rather than the crucial element in understanding subjectivities and memories. Historical archaeologists seem to want to reconstruct and revisit the past, whereas oral history is interested in the past as it is understood today. The gap is a small one, however, and both disciplines can learn a lot from each other.

Urban ethnographers, who have argued for the merging of interviews, memories, material culture and other documentation in order to reconstruct and understand the past, have made the link to oral history more explicit. Using the cultural anthropology of Geertz and others, these researchers aim to use ‘memory . . . as an interpretative bridge to the past’ where artefacts, citing Lowenthal, are ‘simultaneously past and present’.Footnote ²⁴ I also discovered links with my work through the idea of obliteration of the past, the view of the city as a palimpsest where ‘the statement it makes in each era is engraved over the only partially effaced traces of previous statements’ and above all, for my project, to see things, in Glassie's words, from the ‘inside out’.Footnote ²⁵

Location: Bovisa and Piazzale Lugano

As the project has progressed in Milan, it has become more focused on the micro-history of one apartment block – Piazzale Lugano, 22 – a house inhabited by thousands of different people over the last 100 or so years. This micro-focus, in line with the work of Ginzburg and urban micro-oral historians such as Portelli and Passerini – has allowed various themes to be brought in greater and richer detail. I have been able to trace residents of the house and the nearby streets from three generations (the 1920s and 1930s; the 1950s and 1960s; the 1980s and 1990s). Some residents had lived in the house for over 50 years, others for much shorter periods of time (such as children). Moreover, the research for the film also included extensive use of private photographic collections, home movies, music and the interiors of houses, as well as the exteriors, as well as local archives and private archives. I was thus able to build up a rich, complicated and multi-layered picture of the palimpsest that is, and was, Piazzale Lugano, 22.Footnote ²⁶

Where is this project located? Bovisa is to be found on the north-east corner of Milan.Footnote ²⁷ Once at the extreme periphery of the city, the neighbourhood is now vaguely ‘central’, but retains its ‘neighbourhood’ feel – it is an inner-suburb. Born as an industrial quarter in the 1880s, Bovisa soon outgrew its marginal rural past, although traces of rural buildings can be found throughout the zone. Soon, Bovisa became associated with factories and industrialization in general, as well as with smoke and pollution. Huge plants were opened in the zone, above all in the area beyond the railway tracks – chemical factories, soap factories and metalwork plants. Some 40,000 workers were employed in the zone on a daily basis, many of whom commuted to work from the countryside and surrounding towns. Bovisa became bounded by traffic links, above all by the northern railway commuter line (the Ferrovie Nord) that encloses the neighbourhood in a characteristic u-shape.

The symbol of the neighbourhood became its two huge gasometers, depicted by artist Mario Sironi in a series of bleak paintings in the 1920s. Politically, Bovisa was a ‘red’ quarter, with 70 per cent voting for the Socialist Party in 1919, before fascism took over. Most early immigrants were from the Lombard countryside, at first during the industrial revolution in the 1880s and 1890s and then throughout World War I. After 1945, Bovisa absorbed new waves of immigrants from the south and north-east of Italy, who either picked up work in the still-functioning factories, or in new areas such as public administration, container-driving and warehouses. During the 1980s, Bovisa went through a traumatic phase of deindustrialization. All the factories in the zone closed. The gasometers were emptied. Workers disappeared from the landscape. A deep crisis set in from which the zone is now only just emerging, with the transfer of two major Milanese university faculties to ex-factories in the 1990s, the creation of new transport links and a major new urban plan centred on the neighbourhood. Politically, Bovisa now votes solidly for Berlusconi's centre-right and its house prices are amongst the highest in the city. A rapid if complicated gentrification is underway.

On the edge of Bovisa stands our apartment block, the focus of this study. Two four-storey blocks of flats, connected by a central staircase surrounded by four sets of balconies. The first two storeys were built in the 1890s, while the second two were added in 1949–50, including some garret rooms that do not look out on to balconies. A small factory stands in the courtyard alongside a pizzeria, another block, constructed in the 1951 and known as the ‘pink house’, a cellar and a garage. This is Piazzale Lugano, 22. Constructed in the 1890s in open countryside, the house once looked out upon one of the villas of the Visconti family. A canal ran in front of the houses. Visconti's villa was knocked down to create a bridge over the railway tracks. In the 1950s, the first Veneto-born and southern immigrants began to arrive in Piazzale Lugano. Many were employed in the huge post office constructed on the opposite side of the Piazzale. Other dialects began to mingle with the Milanese and Italian. The ring road began to be permanently clogged with traffic. The piazzale was no longer a recognizable square, but a series of roads curving around the city. The canals were cemented over, the fields disappeared and only some tiny rural features remained. Bovisa became an area of high traffic pollution with the lowest level of green space per person in the city. The osteria (bar) in the courtyard became a pizzeria.

As the 1980s approached, the debates over the zone centred on the re-use of industrial areas and some factories were demolished. A new station was built, numerous banks and estate agents opened in the high street whilst small shops closed and three supermarkets opened for business in the area. Piazzale Lugano, 22 also began to change. Foreigners arrived: an Argentinean woman, an English man, a Kurdish family, an Egyptian family, people from Ecuador, Cuba and Israel. The average age in the blocks plummeted as the older generation left, or died. Five children were born to mothers in the flats in the 1997–99 period. Other languages challenged and then virtually replaced Italian within the courtyard and on the balconies. Scooters filled the parking spaces. Abandoned furniture and consumer durables were a sign of the rapid turnover of residents. The jobs were also different – film researchers, editors, illustrators, journalists, teachers, university researchers, students and pensioners but also motorbike dispatch riders, tram drivers, prostitutes, door-keepers and builders. The rapid changes to this place – Piazzale Lugano, 22 – over the last 10 years reflect those in the city. As Tindall writes, ‘the more you know about the past of one district, the easier it becomes to perceive the past of any district through the confusing veil of the present’.Footnote ²⁸ Every block, every house is different, and has its own history and future to be written, but the history of every house and every block can also tell us something significant about the whole city, its inhabitants and its future. The precise ways in which these links can be made depend on the context of each individual project. Clearly, the decline and destruction of working-class communities, slums or ethnic neighbourhoods is an international tale, as the research from other places shows. However, each place has its own specificity. ‘Our’ apartment block informs us about Milan, but it tells us much more about Bovisa and, in the end, it really only enlightens us about that apartment block itself. Nonetheless, the history of the links between place and memory, between the past and the city, can only begin in this type of place – and not from above. Things only become clear under the microscope.

Content: a rural-industrial past

An important – and surprising – aspect of the place-memory which emerged from the interviews was the survival of rural production and rural landscapes in this traditional industrial zone right up to the 1950s. Although clearly tinged with nostalgia, there are strong memories of a place where fruit was grown until the 1930s and where some residents worked as peasants until the 1950s. This rich urban–rural mix of fields and factories, workers and peasants, also marked the lives of the post-war generation, who grew up in a kind of urban village where physical traces of the countryside – as well as real fields – were slowly eaten up by the inexorable growth of Milan.

One former resident of the house remembered not only the fields and production of fruit in the vicinity of the house, but that she had worked as a peasant girl in her youth. She recalled with pleasure the walk to work – where her task was to fetch and carry the baskets of ripe fruit to the peasant women who picked and washed them. The same interviewee also remembered the rapscallion, bucolic nature of this activity, where the children would ‘steal and eat fruit from the Luraghi family [the employers] on the way home’. Other testimonies related to the renting of land from the Visconti estate, whose magnificent villa stood in front of the apartment block. AF's family used to rent and work that land, and she recalls similar fruit-picking, washing and the cold water which was used to prepare the fruit. AF's ‘feet feel hot’ when she remembers running over the grass to pick up a fruit basket, or taking drink to the working women. The F family farmed the land, and owned a restaurant nearby, until the 1950s, when their land was sold to housing entrepreneurs and businessmen, and the rural production went into swift decline with the demolition of the Visconti villa.

Other memories relate to a large courtyard farm in the neighbourhood, known as the ‘big courtyard’ – corte grande. This housing complex was one of the poorest parts of the zone, and one side of the courtyard was demolished in the 1960s to make way for more modern housing. Two sides of the house survive, along with some original residents. Immigrants often found their first house in the corte grande's small apartments, and some still do today. The surprisingly rich architecture of the corte grande – a real palimpsest of a rural farm and parts of a villa – now hidden and eaten up by more urban-style architecture, mirrors the fate of many rural courtyard farms as Milan expanded northwards. In fact, as architectural historians Consonni and Tonon have noted the city grew according to a model whereby ‘processes of inter-dependence and the territorial division of work linked together in single structures farm houses, villages, towns and cities’.Footnote ²⁹ They cite one commentator from the 1940s who argued that the ‘industry took away not just the workers from the land, but also the buildings’.Footnote ³⁰

A more recent series of interviewees, who grew up in the house in the 1950s and 1960s, do not have direct memories of active agricultural work in the zone or linked to the house. However, the traces of agriculture were still there. A horse still lived in the stables to be found on the right of the house and much of the surrounding areas were still taken up by fields. A recurring memory-story tells of sheep being driven through the city, something that could still be seen right up to the early 1970s – and forms a classic photographic image of the past (and of change). Residents who arrived in the 1980s, however, contrasted the entirely urban-industrial nature of the neighbourhood with their previous dwellings. In one case, an interviewee who had grown up in the south of the city recalled rural activity in that zone – farms, animals, chickens – and argued that Bovisa was ‘the city’ in comparison with that part of Milan.

The survival not just of agricultural activity but also of active rural work in Bovisa has some important implications not just for the history of this zone, but also in a wider sense. After all, this area was one of the symbols of Italy's industrial revolutions of the 1890s and the 1950s and 1960s. Bovisa was a highly visible industrial zone, where intellectuals came specifically to ‘watch the working class’, where Futurists visited to paint smokestacks and gasometers and where millions of commuters on the northern railways into Milan could see the dark satanic mills from their train windows. Yet, even in this ‘small Manchester’,Footnote ³¹ rural work not only remained, but was an important part – visually at least – of everyday economic and cultural life right up to the 1960s. This urban peasantry disappeared more or less at the same time as the industrial working class, in historical terms. Italy, even in the ‘city of cities’, never had a ‘full’ industrial revolution. It was always a rural–industrial mix, and this mix had important effects on the culture and politics of the zone, and the city. This osmosis between industry and agriculture, and between city and county, can also tell us a lot about families, lifestyles, communities and resistance, as well as helping to explain the aching narratives of nostalgia with which many view a rural past which has been obliterated and forgotten (physically as well as in terms of memory-narratives). Perhaps the lifestyles and community-feel of Bovisa – where many residents did not work directly in the factories that surrounded them – owed more to the culture of the village than it did to the culture of the fordist production line or that of a modern proletariat. Perhaps, therefore, we should look well beyond the factory in trying to explain the urban development of a city like Milan, even in Bovisa. Perhaps we need to re-evaluate and re-assess our ways of seeing with relation to this kind of city, and adopt new language to deal with this ‘rural-city’ which was also Italy's economic capital. These themes will be discussed further at different points throughout the rest of this article.

Architectures and families

Architecture mattered in our apartment block. The long-balcony system was not only a cheap way to build housing; it was also inspired by rural-courtyard farms. The shape of the house was similar to that found in many areas of the Po Valley, with important differences in terms of the height of the house and the ways in which collective activities were organized. Urban ringhiera (the name given to this type of housing) houses were not constructed so that residents should work in the courtyard for the same employer and within the same economic unit, so the economic unity of the rural farm was not the same as it was in the city. The courtyard in itself was not a productive place in the city, although it was often a place of production. Many entrepreneurial families, for example, used urban courtyards to set up little metal-beaters shops or tiny factories – fabbrichette – which usually produced goods linked to the industrial production in the neighbourhood – in Piazzale Lugano's case a garage was followed by a nuts and bolts factory, which survives and produces to this day.

The courtyard was also – for a long time – the location of a series of collective services – water for washing clothes and people, small plots for growing vegetables, parking for bicycles and later cars and scooters, workshops for a myriad of activities. In addition, many better-off families – who certainly were not rich but had some money to invest – set up restaurants and bars within ringhiera houses using part of the courtyard as a location for drinking, eating, card-playing and the game of bocce – similar to bowls but played on a dusty pitch with ropes. Super8 film of Piazzale Lugano, 22 from the early 1960s shows a number of men playing bocce in the courtyard linked to the house's own restaurant owned then – as now – by the former proprietors of the whole housing block, two families who had purchased the house as a two-floor building at the end of the nineteenth century and had added two extra floors (after World War II) and a whole new house (the ‘pink house’) in 1951. These families lived off the rent for the restaurant and the small apartments, as well as the proceeds of stationer's shop that they opened on the ground floor and worked in together. As inhabitants of a largely working-class area, they had escaped from the factory and their children would not be destined for factory work.

The residential set-up of the house was organized around one extended family – the owners – whose members inhabited many of the flats and assigned them to their children when they got married. The other flats were rented out – at a very low rate – to workers and others who heard about availability either through word of mouth or by chance – simply dropping in to see if something was available. This community was built around a set of long-term residents – mainly but not exclusively linked to the property-owners – and a series of other residents, who sometimes stayed for very brief periods. It was thus a mixture of highly stable populations and highly unstable residential patterns. As such, the apartment block became a kind of refracted mirror of the city, reflecting the social changes in Milan and the waves of immigration to the area.

The first immigrants – including the property-owning family – came from the immediate Lombard countryside, or from nearby streets in Bovisa. A second wave was from areas such as Cremona and Bergamo – slightly further afield. In the early 1950s some families arrived from the Veneto, and two in particular were to stay for over 30 years. In the same decade a number of southern immigrants took up residence. In the 1980s the first foreign immigrants began to turn up and by the 1990s foreigners outnumbered Italians. This latter trend coincided with a decline in the ‘community’ feel of the house, but was not the cause of that decline. The first foreign immigrants had bonded with some of the original or longer-term residents of the house, leading to a situation where some residents ‘always left early as it was so easy to meet up with people and chat and end up having a coffee . . . it wasn't like being in a city’.Footnote ³²

With the creation of a condominium (after the owner-family divided up the property) in the mid-1990s, the central role of the two families who had managed the block for 100 years entered into steep decline. As the flats were sold off, and rented apartments became more and more of a rarity, the previous communities – linked by friendship or by connections to the family-owners – began to break up. Moreover, the central role of the unofficial house-administrator – a woman called CM who ran things inside the block on behalf of the family-owners – no longer prevailed.Footnote ³³ Information about residents, passed on through this central figure (central in terms of the possession and transmission of this information, as well as in terms of the physical position of her flat) was no longer freely available. Many residents were simply unknown to the others. The simple act of ‘saying hello’ became less common, given doubts about the status of various people within the house. The structural features which helped to create and maintain a community – with all the negative features associated with such a micro-society (surveillance, gossip, social control) – collapsed. Some houses were rented out by rack-renting landlords, others sub-let by immigrant owners, others rebuilt by students or others. The end of the old-style community – which had always been idealized, as it was in other houses – in Piazzale Lugano, 22 thus coincided with high levels of foreign immigration, but was not entirely a result of this immigration.

Piazzale Lugano, 22 thus reflected the development of Milan in a series of ways – through immigration, through the sociological and cultural make-up of its residents, through physical changes to the house itself (investment led to more flats being reconstructed, the rural-type restaurant became an urban pizzeria, the stables became garages). These micro-changes to the fabric of the house, recounted in the interviews with residents and neighbours in some detail, were also linked to cultural changes in the house – the arrival of revolutionary politics, the rise and fall of fascism, the formation of an artists' community, the arrival of foreign immigrants – by 1992 there were people from 13 different nationalities in the house. Of course, it would be foolish to draw straightforward conclusions from these trends, but my work on this project has shown that the relationship between the micro and the macro, between memory and place, should be not be viewed in a hierarchical fashion. The micro is perhaps the only, real, way to understand macro changes to the city – and their complicated links to memories and narratives.

Alongside this ‘natural’ movement of immigration, which passed through and changed the house – physically, culturally, socially – there were those residents whose arrival was due to their links with the property-owning family. Hence, a series of residents were family friends, who then created further chains of residents in turn by recommending the house to their own friends. In this way, a semi-sub-community of artists and cartoonists was created in the late 1970s. After the arrival of CU, a worker and aspirant artist, in the early 1970s, a chain of similar people lived in the house. These residents often included the house itself in their work, and this has led to an artistic and visual memory of some of the changes to the house.Footnote ³⁴

More bohemian lifestyles were led by these artists, which occasionally led to clashes with the conservative outlook of the longer-term residents. Arguments broke out over noise, behaviour and privacy – over difference. In the late 1980s, as we have seen, the family decided to divide up the house amongst themselves, sell off the apartments and move out. As the house became privatized on an individual and not extended-family basis, many residents no longer knew who their neighbours were and turnover increased in intensity. The older residents – the memory of the house's past – moved out or died, leaving the physical space of the block to a galaxy of voices, cultures, rentiers and proprietors. The house no longer had a centre. Its fragmentation – and its multi-culturalism – reflected, once again, that of the individualist and post-industrial city in which it was located.Footnote ³⁵

As a way of understanding the specificity of our micro-historical focus, it would be useful to look briefly at another, nearby house to see if similar trends emerged from the history of that place. The El MungusFootnote ³⁶casa di ringhiera was built by GB's grandfather, almost directly in front of the city's gasometers on the edge of Bovisa, in 1908. On the ground floor of this small house – as in Piazzale Lugano – there stood a kind of restaurant. In this case, this place was more of a bar. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a number of people migrated from Apulia in the south of Italy to Milan in order to work in public administration, as industrial workers or as small entrepreneurs. The latter often dealt in southern wine and opened a series of popular bars which became known, generically, as Trani after a town in that region. The Trani were immortalized in Milanese singer Giorgio Gaber's song Trani-a-go-go in the 1950s. El Mungus' Trani relied on the patronage of the vast numbers of workers employed in the factories in the immediate area around the house. Workers would bring their own food, and would be served with wine, which was kept in huge barrels in the cellar. Footnote ³⁷

The next two floors were made up of one- and two-room apartments typical of ringhiera housing, whilst the top floor was dedicated to attic rooms and coal storage. The courtyard was – right up to the 1950s – occupied by stables, a chicken coop and water for washing and drinking. An orchard stood to the side of the house until it was covered by a sulphur factory. In 1946, 17 families lived in this tiny space – 64 people in total, of whom 14 were retired, 22 of working age, 17 children of school age and 11 children under school age. Meals were often taken in the courtyard. On the first floor, 24 people used one toilet. After 1953, when the house went through a process similar to Piazzale Lugano and became a condominium, the houses began to be purchased by their owners who proceeded to invest in their homes, slowly introducing water, bathrooms and other facilities. El Mungus thus was a slightly poorer version of Piazzale Lugano, with a Trani as opposed to a Trattoria, and with a similar rural-industrial feel, despite being in the very shadow of the neighbourhood's huge gasometers, symbol of the zone's industrial development. The isolated position of El Mungus within the neighbourhood meant that it was much less permeable to the changes which the city itself was going through during the post-war boom, above all immigration.

Gender: community, surveillance, exclusion

Our apartment block – as with these other houses I have studied as ‘controls’ for Piazzale Lugano, 22 – was a place managed and watched over by women. Women ran the administrative side of the house – controlling who came in and out on a daily basis, but also decided who rented flats and who did not, collected rent and imposed order and control. Women also watched over the key collective space of the house – the courtyard – filled with children until at least the 1970s. They thus fulfilled the multiple roles of watcher, organizers and administrators.Footnote ³⁸ Routine was a key part of their everyday lives. Many were close friends or related to each other, and would drop in on their friends at the same time every day. Later, these women – as they became older – observed (with some distance, but also as an exotic Other) the bohemian lifestyles that occupied parts of the house for a while, as well as the waves of immigration (from within, and then from outside of Italy) over time that transformed the cultural make-up of the house. Women were particularly important in moments of crisis, when the men were often absent – war, bombing, exile, illness, birth, death and child-care. Everyday solidarity was a key part of their make-up. It was usually automatic and unquestioned, but in some cases arguments led to the breakdown of micro-communities.

In Piazzale Lugano, this role was played by various generations of women, and in the period after the 1960s was taken up by one of the property-owning family, a formidable woman called CM. As the point of reference for many visitors to the house – potential residents, officials of all kinds, postmen and women, traders, the various people associated with the upkeep and running of the block – CM took up a strategic position on the first-floor balcony, a place from which she could observe the courtyard and most of those who entered it. Although the block had no outside bells until the 1990s – visitors either had to ring beforehand to arrange to be let in – at night – or else just wandered in – in daytime – CM had her own, private, bell put in for her own visitors. CM was centre of a network of single women (widows and spinsters) who had lived in the house for many years, and who mainly conversed in Milanese dialect. The block's memory was both maintained and transmitted by CM, who would tell numerous stories about the changes to the zone and various events which had taken place there. She also kept an extensive archive of documents relating to all aspects of the house's development. Her whole life – apart from a short time as a wartime evacuee – was spent in the various flats in the block. She was also a key information source for new residents, providing advice on various practical matters and help in moments of crisis. A kind of micro-welfare state – a place of solidarity and community – certainly existed in the house, although many aspects of this were idealized by residents and others in their stories and interviews. In the El Mungus block, a similar role was played by La Rita (GB's mother) who used to record rents and residents in a large book and lived all of her 90 years in that one house.

As watchers, many of the older women would sit out on their balconies in summer, observing the children playing or the – very little – that was going on. Gossip and surveillance were another aspect – the downside, perhaps – of this feminized community. This surveillance was – of course – built into the architecture of the house, almost as if the design was itself set up to allow observance of almost all movement. Micro-boundaries were not always observed, and people would often ‘drop in’ on neighbours and friends without warning. These potentially oppressive features were not confined to observance, but also took on auditory and olfactory forms. Arguments and sexual behaviour were often – necessarily – public events, as were crises of all kinds – illness, death and birth.

For Saraceno the ringhiere form of working-class housing at Milan led to ‘enforced intimacy’ with neighbours who were ‘constant witnesses and interlocutors of a family's individual most private and intimate behaviour’.Footnote ³⁹ Where public and private spaces were almost the same ‘it was impossible to be alone’ and ‘intimacy was an almost meaningless notion’. Living in an old proletarian neighbourhood also entailed ‘constant surveillance, criticism and malicious gossip’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Public and private space were often merged, leading to the creation of one big flat, without boundaries, for some. ‘Neighbours and relatives were a constant presence . . . spectators not only of everyone's everyday behaviours, but also of arguments between couples, the link between children and parents, the social life of the family.’Footnote ⁴¹

Not everywhere was visible, however, and not everyone was happy to be observed, all the time. The attic flats at the back of the block were not on the ringhiere, a feature which both made them more dangerous – they were the most vulnerable to the many petty thieves who visited the block – but also more private. Alongside the watchers, there were also the watched, the observed. This dichotomy (in such a small space) created tensions which often resulted in petty (public) arguments, and more rarely in violence. Outsiders ‘were sometimes excluded from this world’ (GP) and were usually treated with suspicion (they were usually asked to declare why they were inside the area of the house) but this was also a world which encouraged integration, which invited co-operation at an everyday level.Footnote ⁴² Looking back, most residents have fond memories of these aspects of the ringhiera life, even those who were the most watched-over of all. Nostalgia tinges the memories with softness, allowing the irritations of the past to be glossed over with a smile, a nod or a shrug of the shoulders. In any case, that was a world that is no more. There are still watchers, and there are still the watched, but many of the former and the latter now no longer even know the names of their neighbours. In order for there to be tension, there must also be intimacy, and the latter is missing in today's ringhiera. Today's tensions are added to a sense of anonymity, and can therefore quickly degenerate into violence.

Nostalgia, the golden-age and the bucolic past

Many memory-narratives are always wrapped within nostalgia, defined as a ‘sentiment of melancholic longing with regard to experiences from the past, which derives from a disastisfaction with regard to the present’.Footnote ⁴³ Yet, nostalgia should not just be seen critically, and has to be understood alongside the dramatic physical and cultural changes observed by these living witnesses over the last 20 to 50 years. Nostalgia alters the perception of the past, but these transformations themselves have often been so radical as to wipe out much of the past, in Milan, making nostalgic memory almost inevitable. Also, the altering of perceptions of the past is a natural feature of the ways in which memory-narratives are created, transmitted and broadcasted. The past is thus packaged into stories and often shot in soft-light, but much of this has some basis in reality. There really were fields all around Piazzale Lugano, 22 in living memory.Footnote ⁴⁴ There really were elements of a rural past here until very recently. There really were 40,000 workers in the neighbourhood, almost every day, until the 1960s. All that is largely gone from the urban fabric. Nostalgia is one way of trying to get a grip on the near-totalizing nature of these transformations – it is a tactic, a device and a prism. Of course, nostalgia does not help us with an understanding of the straightforward history of the past, but it does point to the ways in which that past is understood and narrated through memory. As so much of this past only exists in these memories, then the very presence of nostalgia is part of the story – part of history, no less. Those who watched as the farms became housing blocks, and the factories became offices and universities, or simply ruins, and then car parks, saw themselves as witnesses to these momentous changes. Inevitably, they blurred the past – sometimes – into a bucolic golden-age. The alternative was simply to wipe the slate clean, to erase the tape.

The last raspberries: reprise

Milan is often described – rhetorically – as a city without memory, or as a city without identity. Much of this is meaningless, taking refuge in slogans which – in the end – tell us nothing about the city or its history. What is true is that Milan has a different relationship with memory – or the past – than many other Italian cities. Milan tends to obliterate its past – physically, above all – and move on. It destroys and rebuilds. This dynamism, this disrespect for the past – for history – has allowed the city to develop at a pace unheard of in other Italian cities. Thus, it has become perhaps the most – the only – American city in Italy. As with Klein's Los Angeles, the history of Milan is also a history of forgetting.Footnote ⁴⁵

But the past is also everywhere, it is simply not rarefied, or even noticed, in a normal everyday way. Even in Bovisa, there are traces of the countryside and of the ‘little Manchester’ – in people's stories but above all in the very structure of the buildings – farm-houses which have become flats, case di ringhiere which have become something else – many times over.Footnote ⁴⁶ And when there are few traces left, the past can be got to via the memories in people's heads, by the photographs in their frayed albums and by the dusty cassettes in their super8 collections. Milan is a rich, frightening and extraordinary series of layers, none of which have ever, really, been wiped clean. It is a complicated palimpsest. It is up to us – all of us – historians, architects, citizens, old and young – to discover, document and understand this series of pasts, and we can do so by looking at what is there, now, but also by looking at what is gone. Bovisa's lost raspberries may be a good place to start. It is also a good story, even if it may not be true.

Stories, narration and the imaginary play a key role in the analysis of material gathered through oral historical material. Many historians, ethnographers and archaeologists argue that stories and story-telling must play a role in historical research – and that history cannot be understood without reference to the imaginary. In Bovisa, story-telling often reflected a mixture of imagination and reality. The recreation of the past also involves imagined realities – as in my work on families in the 1950s in Milan where I ‘invented’ two types of families in order to examine the kinds of behaviour which marked that time.Footnote ⁴⁷ Similar strategies are used to imagine (or recreate) walks around ex-cities by Praetzellis and Praetzellis in their Oakland project.Footnote ⁴⁸ Of course, such work needs to be used with great care. To this end, it seems to me that oral historians and historical archaeologists could benefit from a meeting of minds. Some of ‘our’ analysis of material culture is clearly in need of an input from anthropologists and archaeologists, whilst ‘their’ use of oral history leaves something to be desired. Here a true multi-disciplinary approach – perhaps the creation of an entirely new discipline – would move everybody forward.Footnote ⁴⁹

As Passerini has pointed out, until the 1980s oral historians had assumed that there was no real subjective conflict between the interviewer and interviewee. A shareable narrative, it was claimed, could be constructed without any real problems. Now new forms of inter-subjectivity have come into play, where heterogeneities are respected and history is seen as deeply marked with continuities and discontinuities.Footnote ⁵⁰ Oral history is ‘an interpretation of the past, and of themselves in the past, carried out by someone who in the meantime has become someone else’,Footnote ⁵¹ but it is also material which is collected, conceived of and analysed by people who during their research are becoming other people. At all these levels, oral history remains the fuzziest, the most problematic and the most subjective of all historical disciplines. It is this inherent inter-subjectivity which makes oral history so hard to pin down, but also so rich in pathways and debate-provoking elements.

As a historian and as a resident I lived and breathed the changing life of the ringhiera, observing, not always dispassionately, the everyday vicissitudes and battles over privacy, community and co-habitation. The place was oppressive and liberating – it was a vantage point for an understanding of a city going through an epochal transformation which would leave no stone unturned, and no Italian untouched. As Milan globalized, so did Piazzale Lugano, 22, and so did I. My memories are now intertwined with the history of that place, even as I left the direct experience of the house behind. This project was also – but certainly not only – a way of understanding my own past, and the film which emerged from this project is an attempt to analyse that recent past with the most subjective eye of all – the camera. Bovisa's fruit groves of the 1930s provided me with the perfect image around which to group these stories. Italy's rapid and unplanned development left so much destruction, but also created complicated and rich memories that, once tapped, can never be suppressed again. A reflection on these memories, and on the micro-histories associated with these narratives, opens up a series of historical interpretations that have often appeared to be closed, or wrapped in certainties. None of this work has any pretence at finality. Yentsch has claimed that with interpretative archaeology, ‘the end becomes another beginning’.Footnote ⁵² The end of working-class Bovisa (in terms of factories and workers, but not in terms of memories, stories, traces, imagination and artefacts) certainly marks another beginning – not just for that neighbourhood on the ground, but for its own understanding and appropriation of its past.