The Green Stuff

It doesn't look like much, but that's actually an extremely rare station sign.  The Milan Metro has two types of entrance; in the main, they're voids in the street, stairs and escalators and lifts disappearing beneath the pavement.  In some cases, such as at Pero, there's a small pavilion covering the entrance, to make it more noticeable.  Only at Lanza is there an entrance actually constructed inside a non-Metro building, as you'd find in many other cities round the world.  I'm not sure why Lanza got this special treatment.

This may be as good a place as any to complain about the street presence of the Metro.  Pretty much every station entrance looks something like this:

A low wall surrounding a staircase down, with a red flag with a white M acting as the signpost that the Metro is here.  The actual name of the station is tucked away.  You can just about see it if you look down, but the best spot to read it is when you're halfway down the stairs.  That's strange to me.  It meant a great deal of confusion for the many Milanese residents who had to contend with a fat English blogger stood on a staircase taking a selfie.  I suppose it doesn't objectively matter which metro station you're stood outside; the important part is that it's a station.  It doesn't sit right with me though.  I guess I want all metro stations to be prominent, important parts of the landscape.

Lanza station deposits you in a small piazza outside the Piccolo Teatro Strehler, one of Milan's premier theatrical venues.  We were at the edge of the Parco Sempione, the extensive landscaped area behind the Castello Sforzesco, and it was an area dripping with money.

I disappeared into the tiny streets and squares behind the theatre, ending up on the Corso Garibaldi, another of those exclusive shopping streets Milan does so well.  It was the first time when I was really captured by the city, having a moment of "this'd be a nice spot to live in".  Obviously that's because it's the nicest, richest part.

This is not a burn on Milan.  It's an exciting, vibrant city, and remember, I wasn't going round looking for the pretty bits.  I was following the railway lines and nothing else.  None the less, I wasn't taken with it in the same way I had been by Stockholm and Helsinki.  The heat didn't help, of course, but I think it came down to money.

Walking around it felt like everything was directed towards money, the earning of it, the spending of it, a city as capitalist as it could possibly be.  I didn't get that sense that the city was relaxing and enjoying itself.  It was a grinding, relentless place, a city that would pick you up and spit you out and not care one bit.  Come here to trade, not to perambulate.

I sank back underground for the trip to Garibaldi station.  Centrale is the grand arrival point for people from all points across Europe; Garibaldi is its suburban brother, bringing workers from the region into Milan.  It also carries transnational services that want to avoid the fees at Centrale.  Opened in 1961, it has 20 platforms on the surface, plus another load underground.

On the M2 this means something unique: island platforms!  They're kind of pointless, because the outer line is only used for storing stock, but after two days of seeing exactly the same architecture over and over again I could've cried with joy at getting a bit of variation.

Garibaldi's also got a far more modern appearance, mainly because Milan keeps building new lines through it.  A tunnel was dug across the city centre to allow suburban trains to pass straight through, creating an S-bahn network that interacts with surface lines at Garibaldi; it opened in the 90s.  Then, twenty years after that, the M5 crossed underneath too. 

Garibaldi's home to one of ATM's customer service centres, which may be the least friendly ones I've ever seen.  Firstly they're appointment only, so if you fancy dropping in to ask the best way to get to the airport you're out of luck.  In fact the one at Centrale seems to employ a security guard on the door whose entire job is to turn away hapless tourists wanting to buy a day pass from a human being.  On some level I admire their refusal to be anything other than obnoxious.  So many railway companies pretend they're your friend while they tell you they're running fast to the terminus because their late running is more important than you getting home.  ATM is unapologetically "we'll serve you when we want and not before".

 

The piazza outside the station is named for Sigmund Freud, presumably because all those trains going into tunnels made for comedy symbolism.  It was in the final stages of a renovation when I was there, removing the parking that used to dominate the front of the station and making it more of a pleasant spot to hang out.  Garibaldi's no looker, however, so I can't see it ever being a stop on the tourist trail.

Directly opposite me was a mass of incredibly tall buildings.  I was stood in the Piazza Sigmund Freud and staring at massive erections; too obvious, Milan, too obvious.  This was Portanuova, a former industrial district turned into the city's version of Canary Wharf.

What really caught my eye was at the base of the towers: the words Food Court.  I was thirsty after sweating all morning so I walked in to hopefully get a seat and a cold drink and some aircon.  Sadly, it was still largely shut up; it seemed to be designed for the office workers to get their lunch, not breakfast, so I went to the supermarket and bought a small pack of fresh fruit and a Coke.  I went up to the plaza and ate it on the edge of the water features to lower the tone.

Milan is Italy's financial centre, and Portanuova is its beating heart.  The headquarters of Alfa Romeo, Pirelli and Versace are here; the UniCredit Tower is the base for Italy's biggest bank and claims it's the tallest building in the country.  Theoretically.  The Allianz Tower, also in Milan, has the highest roof, but the UniCredit has an eighty metre spire as part of the design which pushes it over the top.  I don't think that counts, personally.  That's like me claiming I'm the world's tallest man because I'm wearing a really big hat.

From Portanuova I headed out into the BAM, the Biblioteca degli Alberi Milano.  That translates as the "Library of Trees, Milan", which is fancy design speak for "a park".  Call it a bloody park, that's what it is, that's what people understand.  Giving it a stupid acronym for a name benefits nobody except a load of wankers in a design studio.

BAM is a series of lawns, trees and playgrounds spread over a wide area; it's now the third largest park in the city.  I was headed to its northern rim first, because I wanted to check out a specific skyscraper.

The Bosco Verticale is two residential towers that have been covered in trees and vegetation.  Designed by the Boeri Studio of architects, they're a dense mass of greenery that also includes some beautiful homes.

The screening of green has multiple benefits.  It cools the interior.  It filters pollutants.  It absorbs carbon dioxide.  It encourages wildlife.  But most important of all, it looks fantastic.  Water is recycled from the tenants to feed the plants, distributed via an irrigation network, and the shift of the seasons means that the exterior is always changing and developing.  They're wonderful buildings and the only downside is that they've not been copied all over the world.  So many boring, cheaply clad boxes springing up everywhere, glass towers that reflect burning sunlight down on innocent passers by, and you could have a series of lush vertical forests spreading across the globe.  It hasn't even been copied in Milan; BAM should've been surrounded by clones of the Bosco Verticale and instead there was more terracotta cubes.

Look at it next to the UniCredit Tower - which one draws your eye?  Which one is more pleasing to look at?  (And do you see what I mean about the spire giving it the record of tallest building being a big old cheat?)

The steps of the Stecca 3.0 building were covered with a school trip, a couple of dozen children in high-vis jackets drinking bottles of water.  Apparently it's an "Incubator for Art", which seemed a little over the head of the eight year olds on the steps, so I guessed they were visiting the district itself and had paused for a drink.  It was certainly brutal crossing BAM in the naked sunshine with barely any cover; the emphasis was on arrangements of vegetation in circular spaces leaving the paths in between exposed.  A few nice avenues of trees would've been more than welcome but I suppose that's very old-fashioned and undeserving of the BAM name.  What do you think this is, a park or something?

Gioia was at the base of a canyon of tall office blocks, surrounded by building sites and forcing me on temporary walkways to reach it.  It's another island platform, the tracks either side, and slathered in branding for KPMG, whose HQ is next door.

The next station on the M2 is Centrale, but I was saving that for the M3, so instead I continued to Caiazzo.  The walls were covered with this interesting faceted blue cladding.

Look, I've already run out of things to say about the architecture of these stations, ok?  Let me have my minor differences.

The next station after Caiazzo on the line was Loreto, which was of course where I'd paused my M1 journey the day before, so I cut across through the city streets in search of Piola.

Quiet residential streets, lined with blocks of apartments and trees, straight as a die and intersecting over and over in patterns of diamonds.  It's funny how in the UK, there's constant handwringing about the death of the High Street, and yet here in Italy every single building seemed to come with one or two retail units that were occupied and thriving.  Part of this is to do with shopping habits of course, but it's also the density of the city; those seven of eight floors of apartments all contained people who needed milk and bread and coffee and somewhere to eat out and plumbers and electrical appliances.  

Perhaps, instead of letting our shopping centres fill with vape shops and charity shops, we should do something a little more radical.  Demolish the vacant precincts that, even at their height, were dead after five pm, and rebuild them with stacks of flats above.  Move people back into town centres.  It'd also have the advantage of creating homes for the many, many people who can't get on the property ladder, giving them apartments that are liveable and where you don't need a car.  I can't think of a single reason why you wouldn't do this, apart from, oh yeah, it'd cost money.  So that's the end of that.

I crossed a wide boulevard with a sprightly older person who walked even faster than me, something I didn't think was possible given that I have a TurboMince.  The streets on the other side were narrower but still packed with homes and businesses.  Tiny hole in the wall restaurants offered different cuisines; a café with a long counter disappearing into the darkness at the back served miniscule coffees to parched Milanos.

The large roundabout at the Piazzale Gabrio Piola stood between me and the Metro station; I, naturally, went the wrong way round it and ended up doing almost an entire circle before I reached the entrance.  The plaza with the staircases was covered with young, excitable people; this station is close to PoliMi, the Politecnico di Milan, the city's oldest university and one of the most prestigious in Italy.

In the hall below I found something I'd not seen anywhere else on the network, and would never see again: members of staff making sure people had a ticket.  Though every station has barriers blocking your way in, there are no ticket sellers any more, and most of the stations were entirely devoid of staff.  You can tap and go throughout the network - that's what I did every day - with a capped limit on how much you spend, while machines dispense passes for the more traditional sorts.

I'd guess that Piola, with its high proportion of cheap students, has a problem with fare dodging and so security guards were there to watch people go in and out.  Judging by the shocked reaction of a load of girls who came down the steps with me, it wasn't a regular thing.  It makes me wonder what the fare avoidance levels are throughout the Metro.  This was the only time I saw any enforcement at all.  Perhaps Italians are far more honest and reliable than British people.

The M2 was getting done.  I had one final branch to do.  The other one could wait.

Green Park

 

I never want to hear Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" again.  No, I'll rephrase that: I don't need to hear Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" again.  I'm done.  I've heard every single variation on it, every version, a different chord arrangement, done fast, done slow; I've heard it.  I don't need to hear it again.  And I certainly don't need to hear it played on an acoustic guitar on a train in Italy at nine in the morning.  

(Here are some other songs I do not ever need to hear again: Robbie Williams' "Angels", Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline", literally anything by Billy Joel.  I know you're probably adding "Don't Look Back In Anger" to that list but I have a very fond memory of spontaneously singing that with a coach of students in 1995 as we headed back from a night out at Manhattan's, Southport, and so I can never really hate it).

The point is I was not in the mood for a metro busker, though, if I'm honest, I never am.  She strolled up and down the train, warbling "Hallelujah", trying to catch our eye so we'd be guilted into handing over a couple of coins.  Trapping someone on a train - on a train that is an going a relatively long way without stopping at a station to let you escape - and forcing them to hear Leonard Cohen is surely a violation of the Geneva Convention.  What was worse was I wasn't even getting off at the next station: that was Famagosta, which I'd already collected.  I gritted my teeth and wished I had my headphones until we finally reached Romolo station.

The streets around the station were still in rush hour mode, the bus exchange disgorging commuters, the traffic carrying the slight anxiety of drivers who were that little bit behind time.  The pedestrian crossing held the cars and I could feel their tension, the revving of engines as I walked by, the need to move on.

A thin boulevard of shops and then I was in a park again.  Paths wound beneath trees and alongside grass that still hadn't turned yellow from the sun.  New apartments had been slotted in alongside, built on top of industrial units.

I crossed another road and was then in a different park, this one named, somewhat, incongruously, for Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout Movement.  I was a cub and a scout until my early teens - not especially because I wanted to, mainly because my parents thought if I didn't have some kind of enforced social activity I'd have spent my entire childhood in my room alone reading (and they were right) - so I did a little three fingered salute to the man who started it all.  I wasn't a very good Scout, but I ended up a patrol leader because after a certain point every boy of a certain age became a patrol leader; I still have trouble with a reef knot, I've never been able to do that one where the rabbit goes round the tree and in his hole, and anything more complicated than that is basically an Indian rope trick to me.  

There was a tree near the exit to the park, and someone had hung a small white circle of paper on it, like a Christmas tree covered in wishes in a shopping centre.  On it was written E ALLORA Ti TENGO LE MANi SULLE ORECCHiE E ALLONTANiAMO i RUMORi DEL MONDE - "AND THEN I HOLD MY HANDS ON YOUR EARS AND WE MOVE AWAY THE NOISES OF THE WORLD".  I'm not sure what that means, or why it's all caps except for the "i", but it's a sweet sentiment.

The park emptied me out onto another canalside.  Porto Genova was a district of workshops and factories but, like other areas of its type in cities across the world, in recent years it's been colonised by bars and clubs and transformed into a fashionable district for young people to hang out in.  

At this time of the morning it was recovering from the night before.  The pavement was being hosed down, the seats were being set out, the shutters remained tightly fixed on every third establishment.  Small hole in the wall places had opened to dispense pastries and coffee to passers by but it was an area still yawning.

Why don't we have more vending machines in the UK?  The rest of the world loves them, and they're convenient and always available.  In Britain you usually find them inside a store, which kind of renders them pointless; if a store is open you don't need a machine.  Of course we'd never have tobacco dispensers on street corners - won't somebody think of the children - but it'd be nice to know at three in the morning that you could still get a packet of Wotsits and a bottle of Coke Zero if the mood took you.

I crossed the Navigli Grande via an iron bridge, named the Ponte Enrico Molteni after the bassist for the band Tre Allegri Ragazzi Morti.  He lives nearby and this was seen as a fitting tribute to him; he's not dead, though, which always worries me.  Naming anything after someone who's still alive - unless they're a king or a president - runs the risk of them doing something dodgy in later life which will result in a hasty rebrand.  Wait until they're dead - in fact, give it five years to be sure - and then slap the nameplate on it.  (I should add, for legal reasons, that to my knowledge Ragazzi Morti is a model citizen and the renaming of the bridge is a worthy tribute to a gentleman and hero.  His music's not bad, either - sort of like mid-90s American indie, the stuff they did after Grunge while we were all in on Britpop).  

I do think that, if Enrico lives nearby, he should nip round with a bolt cutter and get rid of all the padlocks that have been attached to the railings on his bridge.  Can we stop this?  It's not original and it's not romantic and it's plain annoying.  I'm sick of going to scenic bridges and seafronts and seeing a mess of cheap Yales with Debbie and Garry scrawled on it in permanent marker.  They won't be there forever, because the council has to come round every few months to cut them down or the fence will collapse.  Bury a time capsule or something instead, you basics.

Incidentally, look at how clear that water is!  It certainly puts the Leeds and Liverpool to shame.  Not a single shopping trolley or bloated corpse to be seen.  The local gangsters couldn't chuck a "shooter" in there to dispose of the evidence, everyone would see it.

The Via Casale takes you away from the canal, back into the city.  It was more touristy here, with restaurant menus in multiple languages.  There were clusters of young travellers wheeling their suitcases over the cobbles, kicked out of their Air B&Bs, looking for some breakfast.

At the top is the Piazzale Stazione Genova, home to the Porto Genova railway station... or at least the building.  Milan is in the process of rationalising its rail network, creating larger more modern hubs and redirecting tracks and services in the process.  Part of this rationalisation meant that the services that previously went to Porto Genova were redirected to the much larger Rogoredo station; the opening of the M4 line meant that people in the area could access them via the Metro with a couple of changes.

The station closed in December last year and as yet there doesn't seem to be a plan for what to do with it.  The booking hall is still open, though the ticket office is closed, as is the access to the platforms; there doesn't seem to be a reason for it, unless Italian railways are determined to provide access to Photo-Me booths.  Even the KFC which occupies the café space has closed its door into the station building.

I returned to the piazza outside to get to the Metro station, a set of stairs descending beneath the ground with an arched roof to deflect the sun.

The Milan Metro is definitely showing its age.  (Aren't we all?)  A lot of the paint is peeling, there are water stains, and the concrete is chipped.  This does create opportunities for street art, however - see?

When life gives you lemons, turn them into a seated gorilla having a chat with Audrey II.

Sant' Agostino station is one of the deepest on the entire system, constructed to try and cause as little disruption to the buildings above as possible.  As such it's a rare Milan Metro station with two tubes carrying the tracks, one on top of the other, meaning a network of escalators and stairs to take you to the mezzanine.  (Isn't the graffiti on the train in the picture above wonderful, by the way?  A charming addition to the boring livery, and definitely not incredibly irritating vandalism that reduces the quality of life of everyone who sees it).

S. Agostino station is not to be confused with S. Ambrosio station, which is one stop further on on the M2.  I feel like they could've put a little more thought into the station names there, so that there weren't two stops with the same name five hundred metres apart.  Still, at least they're close, so if you do get off at the wrong one it's not much of a walk.

There's an extensive plaza on top of the station, though it's pretty featureless and is no doubt mainly used for gatherings of revellers and diners.  (In fact, look at it on Google Streetview and it's like a war zone as the binmen clear up after some kind of public protest/celebration).  The presence of two "British" pubs, the Old Fox and the Nelson, made me wonder what state the square had been in the night before.  It was the morning after England beat Mexico to get to the quarter finals of the World Cup, and I imagined it had been a scene of debauched indulgence and exultance.  I was impressed that Milan's street cleaners had managed to tidy it up so quickly.

However, the Old Fox's Facebook page doesn't mention the World Cup at all, even though there were events for St George's Day and they boast of the best Fish and Chips in town.  I wondered if they'd politely decided not to rub England's success in the faces of their Italian neighbours, a bit like when I picked up my GCSE results with my friends Mandy and Laura and had to keep quiet about my As because they were sobbing over how many they'd failed and all the resits they were going to have to do.  

The Via Olona takes you past Milan's science museum, naturally named after Leonardo di Vinci, and home to the city's railway museum.  A pavilion houses a lot of old engines which I'm sure are fascinating if you like that sort of thing but, as we've established, I don't.  I did consider going for a look round if I managed to finish the Metro early, but I didn't, and besides, I'm not sure any transport museum can compete with Stockholm's Spårvägsmuseet.  It remains the gold standard, as far as I'm concerned, mainly because it used the transport to tell the story of the city and its people, and didn't simply stick a massive steam train in front of you and expect you to coo over its bogies.

S. Ambrogio - yes, I did check to make sure I was writing about the correct station - was given a major uplift when it was chosen to be the interchange with the M4 line.  

It's not immediately obvious that there are two lines here, however.  The ticket hall remains in the standard M2 style, not upgraded in any way.  The only way you'll find the M4 is following the signs down below.

Another four stations under my belt.  I was going to carry on writing about more on the line, but I think we all need a break, don't you?  And perhaps a lie down.  Come back another time for Lanza and beyond.  We can get through this together.