Blue Notes

 

The rain is hammering down outside.  Cold winds whip at the trees and the rooftops.  I'm wearing a thick green jumper.  And yet, for some reason, I'm still here typing up a trip to Milan that happened back in July, when it was so hot I had to wear a stupid hat.  I know you don't care, and to be honest, even I've lost some of the will, but I have to do it for completion's sake, you know?

When you leave San Cristoforo station you're confronted with this enormous spiralling loop above your head.  Climb up to street level and there it is rising up out of a park.

It's a footbridge, constructed to take people across the barrier of the railway tracks, and to link the two halves more equitably.  The M4 was the prompt for its construction, and indeed the depot for the line is right behind here; there are already proposals for an extension to Buccinasco beyond.  For now it's just this grandiose footbridge.

Outside the station is a long pedestrian plaza with gardens and a playground.  The traffic was very much in the opposite direction to me; people were headed to the station for important jobs and lives, while I wandered around sweatily pointing at railway stations.  It's a funny little life I've carved out for myself.

The M4 is Milan's newest metro line, opened in 2024 (yes, I know there's an M5, don't think about it) and the city is still recovering from its construction.  Worksites for the underground have been replaced with worksites for new pedestrian areas.  The city has taken the view that since traffic seemed to cope while they were building the metro, there's no real reason for the road to reopen afterwards.

It means that the line is covered by a series of brand new plazas and squares.  Young trees are stuck in pale grass, while bike paths have been introduced all over.  Milan's policy is very much pedestrian forward, carving up gyratorys and roundabouts to turn them into wide spaces to walk and relax.  Roads are being closed and grass put in where there was tarmac, while they're building rain gardens to absorb heavy falls and spread the water more evenly.  

Of course it helps that Milan has such a good public transport network there's no real reason to own a car.  Beside the metro there are dozens of trams and streetcars, plus a hefty bus network.  Ticketing is integrated across the whole network, and there are park and rides to encourage you to abandon your vehicle and get into the city a better way.  The density helps, too; the pedestrian areas don't become dead zones, windswept concrete that you wouldn't want to walk across, but instead get filled with outdoor tables and benches full of people simply hanging out.

Segneri was my first taste of a pure M4 station (San Cristoforo is shared with the mainline) and so it gave me a hint of the house style.

Every now and then someone will post a picture of a refurbished McDonalds with what used to be there on social media.  The caption will almost inevitably be along the lines of look what they took away from us!  Instead of the bright yellow arches and cartoon colours of the 80s, it's brown and grey, with discreet corporate branding and tasteful artwork on the walls.  The seats are in beige and white and there are faux-wood panels.  Ronald and the rest of the McDonaldland gang are almost completely absent.  It's become safe and dull and boring.

The M4 follows that tradition.  Instead of the M3's wild yellow excesses, or the M5's soft pastel, it's concrete and steel and glass.  It's a stab at modernism without fully embracing it.  If it was stark Barbican-esque walls it would be interesting; instead it's simply... blank.  It's corporate.

The M4 is like the M5, a smaller automated metro built for frequency.  Platform doors screen off the trains and you rarely have to wait over five minutes for one.  

It's like the cold, bare futures of 1970s scifi - a Logan's Run, a THX-1138, where we were convinced the new world would be sterile and clean and automatic.  The short intervals between trains meant that I rarely encountered other passengers on the platform; they'd already been swept away, and there'd be a cluster of only a half-dozen people by the time the next one arrived.  

The Via Lorenteggio has four stations spread along it, each less than a kilometre apart.  It's a truly local metro here, not even serving individual townships but parts of the townships.  

Again, the streets had been tidied up and closed off to create walking routes.  Outside one bar, a grey-haired man sat on white plastic furniture, smoking a cigarette and nursing one of those tiny Italian coffees.  I wondered why I couldn't be like him.  Taking up a seat on the pavement, content to watch the passers by, lost in my thoughts.  His phone was nowhere to be seen.  He didn't even have a book.  Then I saw him ogle a woman in a short dress and I lost all respect for him.

Of course, there's nothing stopping me from actually doing that.  Indeed, that's what pubs are for; a place to sit and while away your time.  There are two differences.  Firstly, you wouldn't go into a pub and order a coffee.  Well, you might, but I couldn't.  I was traumatised at a young age by An American Werewolf in London, where the backpackers go into The Slaughtered Lamb wanting a hot chocolate or some soup and the brusque landlady tells them "we've spirits and beers".  A coffee?  Are you mad?  I feel like even ordering a Coke would lose me the respect of the barmaid.  

There's also an unstated, but implied, urge to get you the hell out of places in the UK.  Once you've drunk your coffee, either order another one or leave.  Don't linger.  Don't loiter.  You might be perfectly relaxed but you've only paid for the one cup and that buys you an hour, tops.  We're not quite at the American stage, where they're horrified if you actually want to stay on the premises and start wiping the table around you to get you to leave, but not far off.

The Piazza Pietro Frattini got an M4-related makeover too, its central island being relaid with spaces to promenade and splashes of artwork.  A climbing frame had been inserted to one side, an incredibly exciting looking one that made me wish I was six again, and people were out walking their dogs and reading their papers.  It all felt so elegant and charming.

Down into the grey depths again.  There are, admittedly, blue highlights across the stations; blue tactile paving, blue handrails, blue seats with the Metro M picked out in them.

It's a boring blue, though, and it blends too easily with the grey walls.  A much more exciting colour would give you a real contrast.  The proposed M6 line has been given hot pink as a colour, which should look a lot better if they persist with this architecture.

Tolstoj!  There is a street near here named after the famous Russian author; they didn't randomly decide to give the station that name.  I'm struggling to imagine a similar situation happening in Britain.  I can't really see them naming a road after a Filthy Forrin, particularly a Russian Filthy Forrin; if you get a street named after a writer in England it's usually an Englishman.  (I put Tolstoy Street/Road into Google Maps and didn't get a single result in the UK).  You definitely wouldn't name a metro station after one.

Not far from the station, on the central reservation of the avenue, was a tiny church.  I darted across the road for a closer look.  It was the Oratorio di San Protaso (I am hearing the word oratory as it is pronounced by General Gogol in The Spy Who Loved Me, because I am a loser), a chapel that had been here for - according to the helpful information board - something like a thousand years.  I was outside Milan's traditional city walls, and the church would have been built for the rural peasants to worship in.  It's still in use today.

It was its unassuming position that got me.  A dual carriageway ran either side of it.  Apartment buildings overlooked it.  Traffic swept by.  There had been zero attempt to make it a feature or a highlight; it's not even aligned correctly with the street, off at an angle, because the straightness of the road was paramount.  Yet it continued to quietly act as a place of sanctuary and silence as it had done for ten centuries.

Bolivar's station works had sliced off the side of a roundabout, turning it into a half-circle.  New cycle paths, their tarmac still gleaming in the sun, had been inserted where there used to be a road.  It was all so civilised.

Then, of course, there was the metro station itself.

The Milan Metro's so good, it even does international travel.  One stop on and I was in California.

Oh, I am a card.

I was brushing against the proper city centre now, within the outer ring road.  The businesses at the base of the apartment blocks had shifted to become mostly service-based, cafes and restaurants, whereas before there had been strange specialist shops.  Italy seems to be a place where the corporate chains don't entirely dominate and I'd often seen stores selling electronics or white goods - small hole in the wall places, whereas back home it would be a Currys on a retail park or nothing.

I was enjoying my stroll.  It was a nice neighbourhood and the pedestrianisation works made it even more so.  Trees shaded me as I walked.  

My attention was grabbed by a single phrase on a shuttered restaurant.

Yes!  It is Cheese Time!  It should always be Cheese Time!  This was La Baita del Formaggio - "The Cheese Hut" - a store devoted to making and selling cheese.  Cheese is one of the greatest of all foods; stuff your chocolate, give me a big lump of something veiny and blue.  The shop's menu has got my stomach rumbling, sat here in boring old Birkenhead without access to a single fancy-dandy handmade bit of formaggio.  Sadly, it wasn't actually open, or I'd have nipped in for a bar to nibble on as I walked.  Like a lunatic.

Coni Zugna station is right on the edge of a park.  The city authorities have filled the street around it with trees and plants, to the extent that it's almost difficult to find the entrance.

Still, that's another one to cross off the list.  Eight!  Eight metro stations!

Yes, that's sweat on my t-shirt.  I told you it was hot.  I don't know how Italians manage to waft around the city in that temperature without also dripping from head to toe.  Perhaps it's genetic.  Perhaps they're not fat and unfit.  It's probably the genetic thing.

The stations are at least clean and feel very secure, even more surprising considering they're unmanned.  The full-length ticket gates help - it's impossible to jump over them, so they help keep the ne'er do wells out.  (I did see an American tourist at Centrale barge his way through a no entry gate, forcing the barriers to open up; he loudly proclaimed "this gate isn't working" as he pushed through, the big red X at the entrance presumably too complicated for him to understand).

The next station was San Ambrogio, for interchange with the M2, but of course I already collected that one so I continued on to De Amicis.  (Didn't they sing Nothing Ever Happens?).  The station mezzanine there gave me a pleasant surprise: history!

The station is sited where there was once a canal and a port gate; the uncovered stonework is the former quayside, dating from the 14th century and built out of recovered blocks from other buildings.  The canal was filled in in the 19th century.  They also discovered the base of a tower, which was moved to the nearby Ampitheatre Park.

The old quayside looked even more notable in among the sterile world of the M4.  It looked human, constructed using hands and measures and tools, instead of the blank walls of the station, computer aided and seemingly put together by robots.

The M4 swings round the south of the city centre, opening up new journeys and providing much-needed relief to the existing lines.  Walking round there it felt like an area that was being woken up, like it had been ignored for a long time and now people were looking in its direction.

One of the edicts I will pass when I am Supreme Leader Of The Universe is there won't be any surface car parks; they'll all be multi-storey, so you can fit the same amount of cars in a much smaller footprint.  I will show the court architects a picture of this car park and I will instruct them to copy that over and over, because good lord it's lovely.

The Metro also means that sights that once might have been overlooked were now within walking distance of a transport hub.  I was a kilometre out from the Duomo, and it would've been a push through narrow streets to get here before.

Now I walked through the medieval Porta Ticinese to reach a colonnade outside the Cappella di Sant’Aquilino.  I doubt I would've come here if there hadn't been a metro station right next door.  I was glad I did.

Of course it was in the midst of restoration work; there is always some beautiful landmark swathed in scaffolding when I visit.  I'm frankly shocked the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II didn't have the shutters down for a repaint when I was there.  Still, I could appreciate the magnificence of it, even if it was largely through the medium of illustrations on the outside.

Vetra provided me with the biggest missed opportunity of the M4 yet.  I descended the escalators towards the platform, and was delighted to see this huge LED screen.  A splash of unexpected colour.

Even better, it was a consultation on artworks to be installed at Sforza Policlinico, a little further down the line.  The stations need it.  Because I turned the corner and saw this:

That huge space above the escalators was begging for some art.  A massive piece of colour or shine to inspire you as you entered the station.  Neon lights.  A screen.  Heck, at this stage I'd have settled for a large Sofia Vergara kissing a trainer.  Anything to liven the place up a bit.

Giallo

The approaches to Centrale stretch back for block after block, so much so they've had to carve a tunnel underneath them so one side of the city centre isn't cut off from the other.  I left the station through one of its side exits, past the armoured vehicle with its idling soldiers that was intended to reassure us, and past the extremely tightly packed trousers of a couple of members of the Polizia.  I'm not sure why the Italian defence forces feel the need to wear pants that are clearly a size too small so that their buttocks are prominently displayed, but I thank them for it.

Back here, behind the stations, there were masses of hotels of all classes, and the streets were filled with wheely trolleys and befuddled looking tourists.  I'd been in Milan long enough now and pounded enough of its streets to feel almost native, and I whizzed around them with barely concealed contempt.  Outside Sondrio station a gaggle of them had assembled and were arguing furiously in, I think, German, stabbing at their phones as they tried to demonstrate they knew the right way and that was it.

Sondrio suffers from its proximity to Centrale - it's close enough to walk to - and so I descended into a slightly silent underground space, one that allowed me to take some absolutely wonderful shots of the M3 architecture without any pesky commuters getting in the way.

I suspect that I'm the only person who likes these stations, and that's fair.  We all like different things.  You're wrong, of course, but that's fair.  Perhaps it was simply that after days of standard, off the shelf subway design I was thrilled to encounter a bit of style.  It's also another reason why it's taking me so damn long to write it all up.  Admittedly, a massive project at home has interfered with it, giving me very little time to sit down and type for a few hours, but still, it's hard to say anything about these stations other than "good" or "bad".  

The area around Zara station was dirtier, rougher, than the streets I'd experienced so far.  This was a Milan that was working hard and not prone to be interrupted by foreign tourists.  

A newsstand for Corriere Della Serra was closed and shuttered; it was hard to tell if this was simply the time of day or if it was a permanent closure.  I went into a grimy Carrefour to top up my liquids, hopping over an unfriendly ramp to the underground car park, and re-emerging just as a homeless woman began an argument with a driver who'd been less than deferential to pedestrians as he'd swung in.  

Throughout these Milan posts I've tried to convey exactly how hot it was in the city.  It was absolutely disgustingly hot.  It was like being stuck in an air fryer.  Finally, however, I have a way to physically show you how warm it actually was, via the medium of candles on the street outside a restaurant:

They were melting halfway down, purely through the ambient temperature; at the top they'd not even been lit.  It was hot.

Maciachini station was on the ring road, a series of crossings to a piazza where the entrance was slotted into the corner.  Faded Covid-era signs marked it as exit only, and I had a flashback to all of that, all of the one-way systems and two metre gaps and facemasks, and it was somehow yesterday and a very long time ago all at once.

Maciachini opened in 2003, though you wouldn't know it; the house style for the M3 is maintained throughout, no matter when the station was built, so it still looks delightfully dated.  It looks, in fact, like it should feature in a Giallo movie, and when I got down to the platform and saw an attractive blonde in a red dress on the other side, the film started writing itself.

Giallo movies - which means, appropriately, yellow, a reference to the cheap paperbacks that served as inspiration - are thrillers made in Italy in the sixties and seventies, lurid slashers where beautiful women are stalked and murdered by serial killers.  There's usually a great deal of blood and nudity and long chases through dark city streets.  The M3 was crying out to be featured in one - all those wide open spaces for a former Bond Girl to run through, terrified, before being throttled by black-gloved hands as a train screams past - but sadly there are very few Giallo movies set in Milan.  

I did watch one which is actually from the 80s, Sotto il Vestito Niente, or Nothing Underneath.  It's set in the world of Milan fashion, with models being stabbed and murdered, often with their breasts out for no real reason; Donald Pleasance is the detective, and there's a moment when he eats spaghetti in a Wendy's, bizarrely.  There's also a chase through Milano Centrale, and a Moschino fashion show on the plaza outside - a plaza which is actually a building site because, yes, they were in the middle of building the M3 at the time. You can watch it on YouTube if you want, though it's not the finest example of the genre. and some of the acting is terrible.  It's grimy and exploitative and very lower rack of your local video shop - not a fancy Blockbuster, the one on the parade that had an entire shelf for Shannon Tweed movies.

I resisted the urge to commit a bloody stabbing and instead got a train to Dergano.  The M3's a straight line here, punching its way out to the city limits, and it was starting to feel more parochial now.  Garages appeared, industrial units, petrol stations, the lower ranked parts of a metropolitan ecosystem.  

Let's all meet up in Snack Bar 2000, won't it be strange when we're all fully grown?

Flags on the lampposts commemorated Enzo Caparra, a lad who had died when the scooter he was riding on collided with a car.  He was only 20 years old.  It was a far classier memorial than the bunches of greying flowers and soft toys you'd get on a British road.

Affori Centro served a large supermarket and a few shops.  Around me were apartment blocks behind walls and trees.  There was, at least, something of a street presence for the station: a yellow arched entrance that looked like a cover for supermarket trolleys but actually contained the down escalator.

Two more stations on the line to go.

I got confused as I tried to exit Affori FN.  It interacts with the mainline station above, which I didn't need to go to, so I followed what I thought was an exit to the street.  I ended up in a small back entrance, tucked behind the station in a dark plaza.

I took the sign picture, then walked out on what turned out to be definitely not the pedestrian route.  I was on a curved road that rose up to the main street beside a large building site.  Taxis swung wildly past me as I tried pressing myself against the concrete wall.

At least when I got to the street it was a cool, dark park, extremely welcome now the afternoon had hit.  A pair of grandparents pushed a tiny child in a pushchair, while I could hear the laughter of schoolkids somewhere close by.  

Now I was back on the main road again, passing the headquarters of the Polizia.  I considered wandering in, reporting some emergency or other, so that I could be interviewed by a large Italian man bursting out of every part of his uniform.  Unfortunately I'd not had a single crime-related problem the entire time I was in Milan.  Perhaps I should've throttled that girl in the metro station after all.  Or perhaps I could imply I had some contraband hidden about my person and would require a strip search.  

My mind wandering to places that definitely weren't wholesome, I traversed a huge roundabout that joined with a motorway exit.  Once again I dashed across a space definitely not built for pedestrians, though this time it was my fault for not crossing the road to where there were actual pavements.

The final station on the line was, like so many other Milan Metro termini, a park and ride.  A multistorey car park crouched over the top of Comasina station while bus and tram stops were located outside.  A McDonalds provided all your nutrition needs.  I took my last sign selfie of the day.

That was the end of the M3, my fourth Milan Metro line completed.  The only one I had to finish now was the newest one, the M4.  Deep breath, folks.  We can get through this together.