Giallo

The approaches to Centrale stretch back for block after block, so much so they've had to carve a tunnel underneath them so one side of the city centre isn't cut off from the other.  I left the station through one of its side exits, past the armoured vehicle with its idling soldiers that was intended to reassure us, and past the extremely tightly packed trousers of a couple of members of the Polizia.  I'm not sure why the Italian defence forces feel the need to wear pants that are clearly a size too small so that their buttocks are prominently displayed, but I thank them for it.

Back here, behind the stations, there were masses of hotels of all classes, and the streets were filled with wheely trolleys and befuddled looking tourists.  I'd been in Milan long enough now and pounded enough of its streets to feel almost native, and I whizzed around them with barely concealed contempt.  Outside Sondrio station a gaggle of them had assembled and were arguing furiously in, I think, German, stabbing at their phones as they tried to demonstrate they knew the right way and that was it.

Sondrio suffers from its proximity to Centrale - it's close enough to walk to - and so I descended into a slightly silent underground space, one that allowed me to take some absolutely wonderful shots of the M3 architecture without any pesky commuters getting in the way.

I suspect that I'm the only person who likes these stations, and that's fair.  We all like different things.  You're wrong, of course, but that's fair.  Perhaps it was simply that after days of standard, off the shelf subway design I was thrilled to encounter a bit of style.  It's also another reason why it's taking me so damn long to write it all up.  Admittedly, a massive project at home has interfered with it, giving me very little time to sit down and type for a few hours, but still, it's hard to say anything about these stations other than "good" or "bad".  

The area around Zara station was dirtier, rougher, than the streets I'd experienced so far.  This was a Milan that was working hard and not prone to be interrupted by foreign tourists.  

A newsstand for Corriere Della Serra was closed and shuttered; it was hard to tell if this was simply the time of day or if it was a permanent closure.  I went into a grimy Carrefour to top up my liquids, hopping over an unfriendly ramp to the underground car park, and re-emerging just as a homeless woman began an argument with a driver who'd been less than deferential to pedestrians as he'd swung in.  

Throughout these Milan posts I've tried to convey exactly how hot it was in the city.  It was absolutely disgustingly hot.  It was like being stuck in an air fryer.  Finally, however, I have a way to physically show you how warm it actually was, via the medium of candles on the street outside a restaurant:

They were melting halfway down, purely through the ambient temperature; at the top they'd not even been lit.  It was hot.

Maciachini station was on the ring road, a series of crossings to a piazza where the entrance was slotted into the corner.  Faded Covid-era signs marked it as exit only, and I had a flashback to all of that, all of the one-way systems and two metre gaps and facemasks, and it was somehow yesterday and a very long time ago all at once.

Maciachini opened in 2003, though you wouldn't know it; the house style for the M3 is maintained throughout, no matter when the station was built, so it still looks delightfully dated.  It looks, in fact, like it should feature in a Giallo movie, and when I got down to the platform and saw an attractive blonde in a red dress on the other side, the film started writing itself.

Giallo movies - which means, appropriately, yellow, a reference to the cheap paperbacks that served as inspiration - are thrillers made in Italy in the sixties and seventies, lurid slashers where beautiful women are stalked and murdered by serial killers.  There's usually a great deal of blood and nudity and long chases through dark city streets.  The M3 was crying out to be featured in one - all those wide open spaces for a former Bond Girl to run through, terrified, before being throttled by black-gloved hands as a train screams past - but sadly there are very few Giallo movies set in Milan.  

I did watch one which is actually from the 80s, Sotto il Vestito Niente, or Nothing Underneath.  It's set in the world of Milan fashion, with models being stabbed and murdered, often with their breasts out for no real reason; Donald Pleasance is the detective, and there's a moment when he eats spaghetti in a Wendy's, bizarrely.  There's also a chase through Milano Centrale, and a Moschino fashion show on the plaza outside - a plaza which is actually a building site because, yes, they were in the middle of building the M3 at the time. You can watch it on YouTube if you want, though it's not the finest example of the genre. and some of the acting is terrible.  It's grimy and exploitative and very lower rack of your local video shop - not a fancy Blockbuster, the one on the parade that had an entire shelf for Shannon Tweed movies.

I resisted the urge to commit a bloody stabbing and instead got a train to Dergano.  The M3's a straight line here, punching its way out to the city limits, and it was starting to feel more parochial now.  Garages appeared, industrial units, petrol stations, the lower ranked parts of a metropolitan ecosystem.  

Let's all meet up in Snack Bar 2000, won't it be strange when we're all fully grown?

Flags on the lampposts commemorated Enzo Caparra, a lad who had died when the scooter he was riding on collided with a car.  He was only 20 years old.  It was a far classier memorial than the bunches of greying flowers and soft toys you'd get on a British road.

Affori Centro served a large supermarket and a few shops.  Around me were apartment blocks behind walls and trees.  There was, at least, something of a street presence for the station: a yellow arched entrance that looked like a cover for supermarket trolleys but actually contained the down escalator.

Two more stations on the line to go.

I got confused as I tried to exit Affori FN.  It interacts with the mainline station above, which I didn't need to go to, so I followed what I thought was an exit to the street.  I ended up in a small back entrance, tucked behind the station in a dark plaza.

I took the sign picture, then walked out on what turned out to be definitely not the pedestrian route.  I was on a curved road that rose up to the main street beside a large building site.  Taxis swung wildly past me as I tried pressing myself against the concrete wall.

At least when I got to the street it was a cool, dark park, extremely welcome now the afternoon had hit.  A pair of grandparents pushed a tiny child in a pushchair, while I could hear the laughter of schoolkids somewhere close by.  

Now I was back on the main road again, passing the headquarters of the Polizia.  I considered wandering in, reporting some emergency or other, so that I could be interviewed by a large Italian man bursting out of every part of his uniform.  Unfortunately I'd not had a single crime-related problem the entire time I was in Milan.  Perhaps I should've throttled that girl in the metro station after all.  Or perhaps I could imply I had some contraband hidden about my person and would require a strip search.  

My mind wandering to places that definitely weren't wholesome, I traversed a huge roundabout that joined with a motorway exit.  Once again I dashed across a space definitely not built for pedestrians, though this time it was my fault for not crossing the road to where there were actual pavements.

The final station on the line was, like so many other Milan Metro termini, a park and ride.  A multistorey car park crouched over the top of Comasina station while bus and tram stops were located outside.  A McDonalds provided all your nutrition needs.  I took my last sign selfie of the day.

That was the end of the M3, my fourth Milan Metro line completed.  The only one I had to finish now was the newest one, the M4.  Deep breath, folks.  We can get through this together.

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.