Castello

It should be noted, for the record, that Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time.  He did implement a series of programmes that saw some of the trains - principally the ones foreign journalists and tourists might use - run on a far more efficient basis, but in the main, Italian Railways were chaotic before fascism and remained chaotic throughout.  

Similarly, though Mussolini liked to claim the credit for Milano Centrale, it was actually a building that had been planned for a couple of decades.  Milan's old main railway station was where Repubblica is now, but as is often the case with European termini, what was adequate in the mid-19th century quickly became outdated and useless.  A new station was planned, with a design approved in 1912, but then something called the Great War came along and held everything up.  Rebuilding resumed in the mid-twenties, to more or less the same scheme, so while it opened in 1931 under Mussolini's rule, it didn't have that much to do with him.

What's undeniable is that Milano Centrale has the oversized grandeur that screams fascist architecture. It feels like it's the product of a giant ego. This is the Carriage Hall, what in the UK would be a simple porte-cochère, but here it's massive.  Taxis and buses used to pass through here but a redesign in the 2000s pushed them into the adjoining squares either side of the station.  Now it's a large entry space, filled with kiosks for mobile phone companies and home to the rental car agencies, and still incredible to wander around.  

This is, I'll remind you again, the place where you were meant to get dropped off.  We're not even in the station yet.

The next circulating space is the Atrium.  This is where the station splits.  Head straight ahead and you're in a modern undercroft where the ticket facilities are.  So many ticket facilities.  

This is the area that was most changed and upgraded twenty years ago and it really looks it.  Suddenly it's all glass and bright LED lighting.  It's nice, yes, and there are also some fast food facilities and little station amenities, but this isn't what we came here for.

What we want is to get to the main hall, so it's back to the atrium where staircases and escalators wait for you.

The lines are elevated as they come into the station so it's necessary to get you up to their level for boarding.

The main hall though... if you don't say "wow" when you walk into it, you may be dead inside.  It's impossible to say or think anything else.  You step into a magnificent lofty space - a church to worship the railways.

Marble reaches upward (though it's concrete made to look like marble at the top; they weren't that mad with the budget) to the high vaulted ceiling with its roof lights.  Like any Catholic church it's richly decorated with artwork and statues proclaiming the glory of God - or rather, in this case, the glory of the train.

During my stay at the hotel across the square I'd often walk over in the early evening, just to poke around.  To look at all the different sizes and sights.  To take it all in.

The station's most famous mural is on the train hall side, one that depicts Mussolini himself - or it would, if the face wasn't completely obscured.  The story is that a wayward bullet during the war hit it and then they patched it with concrete.  Sadly, it's accessible only to ticket holders through new automatic gates watched over by stern guards; they were earning their money turning away American tourists who repeatedly seemed to want to wander through without a pass.  I went up into the Pret a Manger, where a glass balcony lets you see the trainshed for free.  There are twenty-four platforms hosting trains to destinations across the continent.

There are, perhaps, too many commercial interventions at the station.  Either end of the main hall has been enclosed for a glass bubble of a restaurant, but they're not high-end - there's a Wagamama and a Five Guys.  That's very much the vibe with the eateries and shops though at least the McDonalds is squirreled away where you can't see it, and there is an attempt at a food market in one of the side wings.  They've sort of misunderstood how a food market should work - you have to order and collect your food first, then find a table, rather than letting you order when you're seated.  It makes it all the more chaotic, though they had some delicious-looking offerings.

The one store I did have a good look round was the bookshop, which had a huge English language section, as well as a massive selection of Italian books with slightly disappointing covers.  For such an imaginative, artistic nation, Italy doesn't seem to want to put it on their paperbacks; the designs are frequently simple, a single picture and the title and that's it.

Stazione Centrale also has hidden depths of darkness.  Jews were taken from here to Auschwitz during the period German occupied Northern Italy, and a memorial wasn't placed here until 2013.  There's also a special waiting room Mussolini built specifically to receive Hitler when he visited; the floor is inlaid with swastikas.  Funnily enough that isn't often open to the public.

The station works, it just does.  It's epic and awe-inspiring but at the same time, simple to negotiate - you come in here, you see the platforms there, you know where to go.  

The only slight disappointment is the metro station.  There's some great M3 styling under there, but the interface between the underground and the overground is clumsy.  The circulation areas are under the Piazza Duca d'Aosta outside, but they're dark and small and distant; they were built when the Carriage Hall was still in use and so they have that roadway to cross.  Two travelators try to cut the journey but during the week I was there one of them was invariably broken.  

It's a small gripe however.  If anything, it makes the main station look even greater.  You come out of this low-ceilinged warren into the vastness of Centrale above.  

Milan is rightfully proud of its terminus, and it's an instantly recognisable part of the city, which is probably why there doesn't seem to be a sign telling you what it is.  It doesn't need one.  Which is inconvenient if you're a blogger who takes a lot of sign pictures.  You'll have to settle for this one instead.

I came. I saw. I swooned.

Detour

I've been doing this blog for nearly two decades now and yet I can still remember places and experiences from it with real clarity years later.  I had one of those experiences today.  The BF and I were out for a drive in the wilds of Cheshire and we spotted a sign for the "Lewis Carroll Centre".  This is a small, lottery-funded addition to the back of All Saints' Church in Daresbury to celebrate their local hero.  The father of Lewis Carroll - real name Charles Dodgson - was the pastor here and it's where he was born.  

When I moved from the little exhibition space - more of a church hall with information boards on the wall - I went into the church proper and remembered being here before.  Back in 2010, in fact, when I collected Runcorn East station and then came out here because I'm a big fan of the Alice books.  There's a stained glass window devoted to Carroll but I didn't get a picture of it because the church demanded two whole pounds for the privilege and I am very, very, cheap.

They don't charge that two pound any more so, sixteen years later, I am able to bring you a picture of the Alice window.

Very much worth the wait, I'm sure you'll agree.

I will finish the Milan trip soon.  Life has got in the way.  

Yellow Fever

Told you the seats would be worth the wait.  STOOLS!  Mushroom-y stools!  And they're red, to make them stand out.  Admittedly the passenger ghosts on the wall are disappointing but still, how great are they?  All of the M3 stations have them and they're ace.

When you step out of Porto Romana station it becomes obvious why this one got to keep the name and the mainline one had to change.  This is what you see straight away.

The gate dates from 1596 and was one of the entry points through the city walls.  Sadly it's on a traffic island now, so I entered the historic centre of Milan via a series of pedestrian crossings instead, ending up on the Corso di Porto Romana.

The tarmac became cobbles, inlaid with tram tracks, narrower than the avenues I'd been used to.  Men on a cherry picker repainted the side of one of the buildings a bright canary yellow.  Gaps between the buildings were adorned with LED screens beaming out ads.  It was Wimbledon, and so Ralph Lauren posters were everywhere, replacing the football ones that dominated in the countries that actually qualified for the World Cup.

Crocetta station is on a small triangle of land where two larger streets become one.  It's the closest station to Sforza-Policlinico, on the M4, and at one point there was planned to be an underground interchange.  Instead, the next station Missori was chosen as the crossover point, though the actual interchange was cancelled, and you have to pass through the ticket barriers and walk through the streets to make the change.

I used my visit to Crocetta to coo over the light fittings.

Look how pretty they are in the ceiling!  And that ceiling itself; so interesting and practical!

Being extremely positive is tiring, guys.  I much prefer being a cynical bastard.

By now I was on the central section of the M3, where the tunnels are laid above one another to minimise the interference with the historic fabric of the city.  You got a clue about why that was important at Missori station.

Do you think Italians hate building stuff?  Does it constantly wind them up that they can't so much as dig over their garden without discovering another priceless archaeological horde?  "All I wanted to do was plant some petunias and I inadvertently unearthed a long-lost Roman amphitheatre."  I wonder how many times they've started the foundations for a building, found a perfectly preserved forum, then quietly covered it back up again so they could get on with construction.  

At Missori it's the base of a house and some ancient sewer systems, dug up when the metro came through and preserved behind glass in the link tunnels.  I, being an ignorant tourist, was the only one actually pausing to look at them.

I climbed the steps to emerge in the Piazza Giuseppe Missori, now properly in the centre of Milan again.  I'd already skirted the area doing the M1, but that had been in the evening; I was here in the day, looking at the most famous sights of the city.

As I walked north, I realised why Milan hadn't really stolen my heart like Amsterdam, Stockholm and Helsinki had before them.  Milan, I realised, was Manchester.  It was a very good Manchester, it was actually a better version of Manchester, but it was still Manchester.  A big industrial city that prioritised commerce over everything else.

Manchester is a nice enough place to live and work but you wouldn't really want to go on holiday there, would you?  Milan is the same.  Though it's got centuries of history behind it, there's a certain amount of grim faced capitalism running through its heart.  When it built, it built for superlatives; the biggest, the tallest, the widest, not the most beautiful.  

It was telling that the guidebooks I looked at before I came here were almost all "Milan... and also the Italian Lakes".  There was a clear hint that the most interesting places to visit might actually be outside of the city. 

I should emphasise that I did enjoy my time in Milan, and it's absolutely worth visiting, and it's a Manchester only in the loosest sense.  Compare and contrast its cathedral with Manchester's and you realise they're not in the same league.  There's a reason why Milan had recently successfully hosted an Olympic Games and Manchester has failed to get close not once, but twice.  And this is Milan's version of the Arndale:

The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II is the most famous shopping street in the city.  The foundation stone was laid in 1865, though it wasn't completed for another thirteen years, and it swiftly became a centrepiece for Milanese society: a place to perambulate and be seen.  It was one of the earliest shopping malls and it's striking how much it established the style - the tall shops, the marble arcades, the glass roof with the dome.  This is what the Trafford Centre wishes it could be.

It was bombed during the war, and had to be extensively rebuilt; it was restored again ahead of Expo 2015.  One mosaic has to be regularly restored; the arms of Turin on the floor include a bull, and there's a tradition that spinning your heel on its testicles will give you good luck.  This means there's a drill effect on the tiles and they keep having to be relaid.  The most recent restoration caused controversy because the bull's testicles weren't as prominent as they used to be, and there had to be redo to make sure the bullock's bollocks were as magnificent as they were intended to be.

The shops lean heavily towards the elite, with some of them being recognised as historic in themselves.  There isn't a Greggs, let's put it that way.  

Look closely at the very pinnacle of the central dome and you can see that some local scrotes have decided to decorate it with black spray paint.  I know we're meant to be very considerate to these inner city youths, reach out to them and teach them, give them diversions to stop them from committing crimes, but I think when they're out vandalising internationally renowned historic landmarks, a good hard tasering to the crotch may be called for.  There's no excuse for it at all.  If they'd slipped and slid all the way down that dome to the ground I would produce, at most, a shrug.

The Galleria links the Piazza del Duomo with the Piazza della Scala, connecting Milan's two most iconic structures with one of its own.  The Palazzo Marino, the city hall, is at one end, and they still had the Olympic rings mounted outside.  On the other side is the Teatro alla Scala, the opera house, and one of the most important cultural institutions in Europe.

La Scala hosted the premieres of the likes of Otello and Madama Butterfly and we have now exhausted all my knowledge of the artform of opera.  It's one of those things I think I should perhaps look into, get myself a nice recording of something not very complex and sit down with the lyrics and try and appreciate it, but who has the time?  Especially now Strictly's back.  I know from Pretty Woman that you're not truly classy until you go to the opera for the first time and are so moved to shed a single, cinematic tear to symbolise your transition from hooker to debutante.  If any Richard Geres are out there and willing to take me I'm up for it.  

I was now in the Fashion District, the heart of Italian elegance, the core of extremely highly priced elegant clothing shops.  Once again, like Julia Roberts, I was distinctly out of place among these temples of style, though sadly I will never get to strut into Valentino for my "Big mistake.  Huge." moment.  I am physically incapable of paying that sort of money for clothes.  If I won the EuroMillions and was in Milan with £100 million in my pocket I still couldn't bring myself to fork out, say, £695 for a black t-shirt with silver tape embroidered on it.   That is simply ludicrous.  You could get a decent minibreak for that money.  It's obscene.

I'm clearly in the minority about this, because the whole area was awash with people carrying extremely expensive carrier bags, but on the plus side when the revolution comes I'll be with the proletariat helping to put them up against the walls to be shot.

Montenapoleone station is on a small square between the Grand Hotel et Milan and the Hotel Armani.  The former was where artists and composers traditionally stayed before performing at La Scala.  Verdi had a suite here, still in use today, and it was where he suffered the stroke that would kill him in 1901.  The Hotel Armani is much newer, unsurprisingly.  As I passed the restaurant two obvious models came walking out.  I'd never been that close to a model before and they are truly not of this earth; taller than me, barely in three dimensions, their faces so carefully crafted you could've immediately turned them into statues.  They held the tiniest handbags and carried with them a clear disdain for the rest of humanity and honestly, fair.  If I looked that flawless and I had to spend my days around the toad people who form the rest of my species I'd get a bit annoyed.

Look at the state of that.  Gross.

Have I talked about the station toilets yet?  I should talk about the toilets.  They're housed in an alcove behind these amazing red glass doors.  I didn't actually go in them, because a public toilet in an underground station is rarely a place one wants to visit, but look at those lovely doors.

And look at these wonderful circular voids in the checkerboard walls.  They could've put in a boring old opening to let light and air through but instead they put in portholes.

Magnificent.

One train ride later and I was at Turati, heading outside under another of those bright yellow ceilings that will never get old to me.

I paused to take my usual photo with the sign on the steps, but as I lined up the camera, I became aware that there was a slight tension in the air around me.  There was a bit of a crowd up ahead, and I could see policemen.

The building right next to the metro stop is the American consulate, and a series of hefty security structures have been put in place to keep it safe.  Part of the pavement has been reconfigured with covered walkways and a small glass porch houses the first wave of checks before you're permitted inside.  I hustled past quickly before they noticed my camera and assumed I was some sort of terrorist, ending up on the Piazzi Stati Uniti d'America, named as a tribute after 9/11.  (Amusingly, Via Della Moscova runs right through it). 

The Via Filipo Turati takes you north, and then the road suddenly opens out into the massive Piazza della Republica.  

This isn't a square, in the traditional sense, but is instead more of a massive open air meeting spot.  Wide avenues cross over one another, separated by acres of grass and trees.  Trams come and go to interchange and terminate.  Pedestrians scurry over the various crossings, moving from one island to the next, held up again and again while another stream of traffic pours by.  It's an epic piece of urban design.

I dodged and crossed and finally ended up by an entrance to the metro, handily located by a tram stop for effortless transfers.

All that space up top meant that Repubblica station could be even more open and gorgeous than its siblings on the M3.

Incredible.  I could live here.  Not the city, I mean specifically inside this metro station.  

My next station, finally, was Centrale.  I'd skipped it when I did the M2 because that was already an overwhelming length of line to cover.  Now I could give it the attention it deserved.

We're gonna need a bigger blog.