Red Rover

 

QT8 is a very strange name for a metro station.  You don't get many stations that are abbreviations.  You instinctively want to run it together to form words: cutie-eight.  And now I'm thinking of when John Gardner introduced an assistant to Major Boothroyd in his Bond novels and nicknamed her Q'ute.  Those early Gardner novels were weird.  They uncomfortably straddled Ian Fleming seriousness with Roger Moore insanity - I'll just say one breasted woman eaten by giant snakes.  If you know, you know.

QT8 actually stands for Quartiere Triennale Ottava.  It was a district constructed as part of the eighth Milanese Triennial, an art and architecture festival that has run every three years (on and off) for a century.  The idea, lead by a planner named Pierre Bottoni, was to build an "ideal" district - a showcase development of the future.  They drew ideas from all over the world, particularly the English Garden City movement, and built a district on the edge of the city that was full of greenery, with smaller blocks of apartments and a break from the rigid street plans found elsewhere in Milan.  The buildings were also prefabs, to accommodate the post-war need for homes.

I came out of the station behind a gaggle of excitable Sri Lankans lugging cricket equipment.  I personally thought one of the advantages of moving to Continental Europe would be never having to deal with cricket, the world's most boring sport.  It's like moving to London and still playing American Football; you don't have to do that now, you can play a proper sport that isn't eight parts ridiculous.  Cricket takes entire weeks and no sport should ever last that long.  This is why the Olympics is so great; the entire Games last a fortnight and there are a million different events you can flick between to satiate your limited attention span.  I guess you can drink a keg of beer at a cricket ground and nobody minds, but these gentlemen seemed to have only athletic equipment.

I'd left the station outside the Church of Santa Maria Nascente, an unusual circular building.  I was hoping to hear the strains of a Latin Mass floating outside but there was nothing.  Being in Italy on a Sunday morning had filled me with aspirations of seeing parades of black clad widows headed to church but there was nothing of the sort; like many cities Milan is deeply secular these days.  

The greenery around the wide avenues was welcome.  I'd gone only one stop from Lotto but it felt like an entirely different city.  There's a man-made hill here, Monte Stella, constructed out of the rubble left over from the war (Milan is weirdly flat, with very few even mild hillocks, and there's not a massive river in the centre either; it makes you wonder why people set up a city here in the first place).  Monte Stella is the green heart of QT8, with the homes circling it and its slopes given to all kinds of leisure activities - this was no doubt where my cricketing companions were headed.

I paused to refill my water bottle at one of the free water fountains that are scattered throughout the city.  The spigots are shaped like a fish, and have a neat little trick; if you block the flow with your thumb, it shoots out a hole in the top of the head, making it easier to drink from directly.  These fountains would be literal life savers over the next few days, popping up on street corners and in piazzas to allow me to rehydrate and wipe away some of the sweat.  And once again - this is free for everyone.  

I was sauntering now, strolling under the canopies, enjoying the morning.  Joggers went by, somehow looking more refreshed than me even though they'd been actually running.  A school named after Martin Luther King appeared to my right, I Have A Dream painted across its front, while a random fence post had been topped by a tin of Tennents Lager, an unexpected bit of Scottish litter in the middle of Lombardy.

I crossed a hefty road junction and found my way towards Lampugnano station.  It was constructed as a park and ride, with a hefty multi-storey attached, and at its base is a bus station which is home to FlixBus and a lot of other long-distance coach services.  (Where the hell did FlixBus come from, by the way?  I swear I'd never heard of them a decade ago and now not a single contestant on Race Across The World can go anywhere on the continent with it being on a bright green single decker).  

The net result of this is that ATM don't really expect anyone to walk up to Lampugnano; they're all interchanging between various means of transport.  It meant I was dodging moving vehicles and crossing bus lanes to try and reach the station.

When I got there though, I had a surprise: a station building!  Every stop so far had been a hole in the ground - this was the first time the Metro had an actual street presence.  I dashed over, avoiding the homeless man asleep on the bench and the various people idling about - possibly for a bus, possibly for more nefarious reasons - and took my photo.

The presence of an above-ground ticket hall didn't induce a sudden rush of architectural magnificence, however.  It was a concrete box with a little bit of natural light.

It reminded me of some of the stations towards the end of the Green Line on Stockholm's Tunnelbana, the ones built in the fifties to serve brand new estates on the edge of the city.  Lampugnano was opened in 1980, however, so instead of it feeling like an architect embracing a modern construction method to make a statement, it smacked of "this is cheap".

I'm personally not a fan of trains - as I've always said, I like railway stations, not railways - but I know some of you are so here you go: a video of an M1 train arriving.  Please don't ask me what class it is because I have no idea.  (Equally, please don't tell me).

One hop on and I was at the next station: Uruguay, or, as my brain pronounces it thanks to Homer Simpson, U R Gay.  Which would make standing under it and taking a picture kind of a burn if I wasn't, you know, gay as a window.  

I rose up into a wide stretch of parkland between two roads, surrounded by apartment blocks and well-used.  Children yelped in the playgrounds.  People much fitter than me played sports.  

By a bus layby was a water house, a supersized version of the water pump I'd used earlier that dispensed still and sparkling water.  Two old ladies were stood beside it with shopping bags packed with empty bottles, filling each one in turn; I silently disapproved, but apparently part of the purpose of the water house is to reduce people using plastic bottles so I guess they were being eco friendly.  It still felt a little like they were taking the piss.

The blunt bulk of the Bonola shopping centre loomed up ahead of me, and I followed its flank in search of a way in.  I was out of luck.  There didn't seem to be a pedestrian entrance at all.  Eventually I gave up and walked through the car park underneath to a sloped travelator.

I wasn't here to shop.  I was here to have a few moments of blessed air conditioning.  I thought that, perhaps, I might have a coffee and a small snack, if I could find somewhere suitably middle-market for me.  I wanted a corporate chain of some sort, somewhere I could be anonymous and hide away and not have to be confronted by waiters or tipping or speaking too much English to bewildered Italians.  I wanted an Italian Greggs, basically, where I could buy something pastry and slip away.  I was out of luck, however, as everywhere seemed far too classy for me, far too "eatery".

I'm not saying that the Bonola was an exclusive mall, by any means; quite the opposite in fact.  I just mean that what it had was still overwhelming to me.  I am chronically afflicted with shyness, with awkwardness and anxiety, with a fear of doing or saying the wrong thing.  I don't have the confidence to pull up a chair and get waited on, to order a single coffee and a croissant, to casually cast down a few coins to clear my bill and wander off.  I need the regimented world of customer-shopkeeper, an exchange of goods for money, then I can go.  I was soon headed to the exit, back down to road level, without so much as a Coke passing my lips.

Incidentally, on entering the mall I was confronted by a large sign telling me that photography was strictly prohibited inside, so please enjoy all three pictures I took inside, to stick it to The Man.  Unfortunately I didn't get a photo of the lady who came up the opposite walkway moments later who was wearing a Fido Dido t-shirt and made me think I had somehow slipped into a wormhole back to 1991.

Bonola station was located through a couple of underpasses decorated with graffiti and gentlemen of the road.  It gave me another above ground building, and I want you to cast my mind back to where I complained about how dull Lampugnano was.  How I thought it could do better.  Well, Bonola was trying for something.

I didn't expect that something to be bright blue paint all over it.  I'm not sure about the mindset here.  I mean, it's not attractive, so we can rule that out immediately.  It's not tied to the corporate appearance of the line, because, as we've seen, the M1 is a bold red.  I could only think that the blue was some kind of special anti-spraypaint coating to put off the local "artists".  Perhaps it was more of a psychological barrier, with nobody locally wanting to post their tag on such a hideous background.

Inside they'd made a valiant effort at a bit of a feature with circular rooflights.  Unfortunately, ATM had missed that you need to keep those features clean and well-maintained, otherwise you're drawing people's eyes to a mess.

That's not a skylight, it's an angry sun about to go nova.

Long-time readers (hello you!) will know of my fondness for a station clock.  The Milan Metro has an example in most of its ticket halls, and it's a good one: sturdy, clear, and always showing the correct time.

I was at San Leonardo, which was the terminus of this branch of the M1 between 1980 and 1986.  Its station building has not been blighted with blue paint.  

In fact, that was the first surface building that looked like it was in a good place.

The sun was baking down now, burning at the streets and hapless English bloggers who didn't really take in how going to Italy in a July heatwave would fundamentally alter their body chemistry.  Everything about me was wet and clammy.  Everything was moist.  

Still, I did finally get to see my devoted Italian parishioners, as the church that gives the station its name had reached chucking out time (I don't think that's the correct theological term).  Groups of elderly people made their way slowly out of the front door and dispersed to the surrounding homes.  I don't think there was anyone under the age of fifty, which doesn't bode well for the future of the Catholic church.

Molino Dorino - the next station, and not, as you may think from that name, an adorable mouse in a children's cartoon - was built as a single station extension in 1986.  It was hard not to imagine the Milanese authorities didn't so much plan metro extensions, more come up with them on the fly when they realised they had some money left over.  "Turns out we got more council tax than usual this year, fellas - shall we build a bit of underground railway?"

The real reason for the extension was to get another park and ride on the map.  Molino Dorino is nestled in the corner of a major road junction and has been gifted with a car park that looks like a modern fortress, turrets and towers overlooking the roundabout as you approach.  There's another bus exchange here, and the metro station building is... oh dear.

It just doesn't work.  It's horrible!  Leave it bare, for goodness' sake.  Anything to distract from this sky blue abomination.

It's a lot better on the inside, though it suffers from an overabundance of empty shops.  I can see why they'd have built it with a mini-mall inside, what with all those bus customers too, but now it looks sad.  ATM have recently signed a deal to regenerate their commercial spaces, handing them over to a private company to try and get some life into them.  It's a shame they couldn't do it themselves but it's not hard to see what needs to be done.  People don't buy newspapers any more, they don't smoke, they bring a bottle of water from home; the on-the-go facilities that would've traditionally filled the mezzanines are all dying off.

Pero station brought something truly shocking.  At the track level, every station on the M1 looks more or less the same.  A central tunnel - usually with pillars dividing the two directions - and platforms on either side.  It's so standard I've had problems differentiating between the pictures I've taken, having to zoom in to the name to make sure I don't stick a Gambara in the Wagner section by mistake.

Pero gave me an island platform.

Perhaps heat stroke was setting in but I found this far too thrilling.  It's not a true island - the escalators and stairs are all in walled off sections behind it, leaving only passageways to access the southbound tube - but still, the variation was welcome.

Above ground Pero had another pleasing sight - a small head house for the escalators and stairs.  This shift in architectural style is probably due to it being constructed in 2005, long after the rest of the line (it's the newest station on the M1, for the time being).  Putting the entrance in a dedicated building at the centre of a small piazza feels like a far more 21st century way of building a Metro station.

I was now forced to go back down underground for another train, something I hate doing unless it's really necessary.  Unfortunately the final station on this branch wasn't constructed for people to walk to at all.

Rho Fieramilano serves the huge exhibition centres of the same name, a complex surrounded (like the NEC in the UK) with motorways and industry.  Milan is extremely keen on its exhibition centres; I've never known anything like it.  They've hosted the World Expo twice (in 1906 and 2015) and both the red and green lines terminate at complexes of boxes for exhibitions.  Fieramilano, meanwhile, is the modern replacement for a centre in the city itself, bits of which are still in use.  

I've never been to a trade exhibition in my life so I'm not really sure what they involve, but surely they're not that frequent and busy?  There are twenty pavilions at Fieramilano so clearly they're getting a lot of use.  I began to think about all the industries that must turn up there to look at booths covered in inventions, clusters of dental hygienists and plasterers and psychotherapists all gathering in breakout groups to hear the newest innovations.  

It also made me think about Expos.  The Wikipedia page for "World's Fairs" shows that, after the Brits invented them with the Great Exhibition, we hosted one more in 1862 then decided we couldn't be bothered any more.  It's strange that the UK has absolutely no appetite for hosting this multinational event ever again - as far as I'm aware we don't even bid for it.  You'd have thought somewhere like Manchester or Glasgow would be all over that to bolster their credentials as an international city. 

I went through the glass topped ticket hall - which, in the July heat, was like a greenhouse; it's lucky Italy isn't a country that gets hot very often, eh readers? - and emerged above ground.  I'd not gone to the exhibition centres themselves but had instead looked for a pedestrian entrance, the one that is theoretically for people not attending a convention.

I may as well have been on the surface of the moon.  Long expanses of concrete with footpaths nobody used.  Bridges carried conventioneers around on air conditioned, traffic free routes, while us peasants hunkered by their little staircase into the underworld.  

I'd gone from an idealistic version of city life to its dystopian cousin.  It could only get better after this.