Green Land

 

It's weird how hotel breakfasts cause you to eat the most random of foods.  I started my travels round the M2 full of a combination of cocktail sausages, frittata, and fried peppers, a combination that I wouldn't eat under any circumstances back in the UK.  Somehow if you put it in a breakfast buffet I work my way along the row of cloches and shove a heap of everything on my plate.  (Although I did draw the line on the Thursday when I opened one up and found peas underneath.  Peas are not a breakfast food).

The point is I was absolutely stuffed when I arrived at Piazzale Abbiategrasso station.  I'd need the energy.  The M2 is even longer than the M1, so long that I'd already planned on leaving one of its branches - the one to Gessate - until the next day.  I'd need to really push myself if I was going to complete my objectives.

I headed south on the first train that I saw, unbothered about which terminus I ended up at; I was going to have to do the other one anyway.  The Abbiategrasso train came first so they "won".

Yes I do look knackered.

It's a funny little stub of a branch, only having a single stop, mainly there to tie into the two tram routes that end here.  I crossed over the road and onto a wide patch of grass, and from there into the Parco Chiesa Rossa.  

I felt good and raring to go.  Finishing off the M1 the day before had been the right thing to do, even if it left me crawling into my bed.  I felt like Milan was absolutely within my bony fingers.  And if it could just stay nice and cool, as it was right then at eight in the morning, that would be much appreciated too.

The shade was welcome for me and for the other joggers and walkers using the park at that time of the morning.  There were already some old people taking up space on the benches, getting in their constitutionals, and a man filling his water bottles at the council fountain.

The Naviglio Pavese is one of Milan's few remaining canals, a connection from the city to the southern town of Pavia.  There used to be a whole network of waterways all over the region carrying boats and working as irrigation tools, all feeding into a circular route around Milan's medieval centre that acted as a kind of massive roundabout for boats.  It was built over and turned into a road in the twenties, as were most of the other canals.

Today the main remainders are in the south west of the region, though they're no longer used as canals.  There have been proposals to reactivate them as leisure facilities; indeed, now and then politicians promise to open up the culverts they're hidden in and restore them as open waterways.  Nothing's happened so far.

Crossing the river I ended up in a knot of residential towers and buildings.  As I walked towards my next station, Famagosta, I began to slowly acquire fellow travellers, like the Pied Piper.  They were all dressed far more sensibly than me, off to serious jobs in Milan, lugging laptop bags and wearing ties.  (Why are people still wearing ties in 2026?  Throw them away!)

Famagosta is another fantastic interchange; multi-storey car park, bus terminal and metro station, all right next door to a motorway junction.  Park and ride seems so easy here.  There doesn't seem to be any logical reason why you'd drive into the centre of town.

If you were hoping for a radically different architectural style on the M2, I'm sorry.  The red and green lines were planned at the same time, though the M2 opened five years later, and so they share a great deal of the same design elements.  It does feel like there's been a slight honing of the plan; the ticket halls feel tighter, and the green line feels easier to get round.  Or perhaps I was so used to the layout by now it had become second nature.

One interesting ("interesting") difference between the M1 and the M2 is that while the trains on the red line use the third rail, the green trains get their power from overhead lines.  

The train rose up out of the tunnel and into the open air.  The M2 is the only line that has overground sections and I don't like it.  I didn't come all the way to Milan for surface railways.  I have surface railways at home.  I want tunnels and subterranean excitement.  I want a Metro that sneaks along and drops you in a new, completely different place without you knowing how you got there.  I don't want to see the next station in the distance.

This branch opened in 2011, another of those two-station extensions that Milan is so fond of.  Being above ground, it's open and light, with a spacious ticket hall that was filled at that time of the day with busy young people.

This is not a busy young person.

The reason for all these people became clear when I got outside.  This part of Lombardy has developed into a huge out of town development with offices, shops and residential towers all slotted in beside one another.  It is, I have to say, astonishingly bland and forgettable.  The district is still under construction and it's strange to walk round.  It feels very American, very Milton Keynes, a leftover from that period in the 1970s when we were convinced that Los Angeles, with its miles of freeways and car parks and straight roads, was what we should be aiming for.

The central piazza was open and laid out with interesting paving, but I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to linger here, not even to eat their sandwiches at lunchtime.  It was a void between the buildings.  I took a couple of turns, knowing which direction I needed to go but not exactly how to get there, and followed a long ramp downwards.  Halfway I realised it wasn't a pedestrian access at all, it was a service road, and I was descending behind the backs of the shops and the car parks and onto a strip of land between fire escapes.

Nothing about this said Italy.  I could've been anywhere in Europe, the back of any mall or office complex.  Thin grass had been laid out over the corners but desire paths crisscrossed them as people took the shortcut from their car to the McDonalds.  A colossal Virgin Active gym was accompanied by a cinema, run by UCI, a brand that used to be familiar in the UK but was long ago merged into Odeon.  They were boxy and unattractive.

I crossed in front a Carrefour so large it probably had its own weather system and skipped an exit from the nearby motorway.  Pedestrians were meant to follow a carefully laid out route, but I had no need to wander deep into the car parks so I stuck to the verges.  The buildings now were low 1980s business park chic, Dynasty-glass fronts done on the cheap.

All the pedestrians were going against me, walking from the station to their offices for the start of the day, formally dressed.  It really could've been Bracknell or Swindon or any other lazy punchline town.  It was generic and I was disappointed, as I always am when I travel hundreds of miles and encounter something that could be in England.  Wow me with some exotica, Milan!

I climbed the stairs up to a long scifi tunnel.  The Forum of the station name is an indoor sporting arena, the other side of the tracks; it was recently used as the host of the ice skating during the 2026 Winter Olympics.  One end of the tunnel serves the arena, the other the business park.

It's naturally extremely like its brother at Milanofiori Nord.  It's still another surface station though, so I'm not really bothered.  Get me underground!