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.