Red Sky At Night

 

Spending the day up and down the M1 had exhausted me.  I went back to my hotel and, after a shower, collapsed on the bed and napped.  I'd wiped most of the red line away.  The rest could wait for another time.

Except...

If I got up and went out, I could finish it off, and then the whole line was done in a single day.  That'd be great, wouldn't it?  I put on some clean clothes and went out into the city.

My hotel, the Nyx Milan, was across a piazza from Milano Centrale, but I decided not to use the underground to get to my next station, Lima.  It was a simple walk across town and it had cooled down enough that it wasn't a nightmare going for a stroll.  (Incidentally, I highly recommend looking for hipster hotels owned by large chains when you go to a strange city.  The Nyx was full of bright colours and leopardprint and artwork like this:

They lowered the prices as a result, to try and attract the cool young things, but of course cool young things are staying in small boutique hotels or Air B&Bs.  It meant that I got a very reasonably priced room in a fantastic location and all I had to do was try not to cringe myself inside out when I read the irritating copy on the menu).

The area round a large European rail terminal is rarely the high point of the city.  There will be an impressive plaza out front, and some nice hotels, but if you go one street back you'll hit a dark underworld.  Milan was no different.  I was walking along roads built for a transient population.  The restaurants were small and dirty, promising fast food and cheap prices and please don't look at how filthy the floor is.  There were hostels, all with ridiculously grandiose names, the ones with two stars displaying them proudly like a child showing you it's done its poo in a potty this time.  The other people on the street were either tourists like me, blithely strolling along to get somewhere prettier, or rough individuals with dark minds and pasts.

I was weirdly offended when a man in a doorway, stopping passers-by to offer them something in a whisper, looked right past me.  Hey, I might look like a fat old man, but I might be cool!  I might want some heroin!  There's no harm in asking, is there?  

Lima metro station is on the Corso Buenos Aires, one of the principal shopping districts of Milan.  It specialises in the more down-to-earth purchases, unlike the madly expensive designer wear around the Duomo; this is where you or I would shop, where it's not eighteen hundred Euros for a plain white t-shirt.  

Lima's position on a main shopping drag meant that its mezzanine retail outlets were in a healthier state than the slightly sad empty boxes I'd seen elsewhere on the line.  There was even a bookstore, specialising in scientific texts and rarities.

The next station, Porto Venezia, is located in Milan's Gay District.  See if you can spot how I knew this.

The rainbow decoration was actually put there by Netflix; they decorated the station for an advertising campaign in 2018 and the city liked it so much they left it there.  It gave me the same warm, safe feeling I always get when I spot a rainbow flag out and about.  This is where my people are; this is ok.  If I'm in a strange place and I spot a bar with that flying over its door I know that's somewhere I can go.   The rainbow flag isn't just a political statement, it's a signal.

I also love that the homos were the ones who made over a station.  "The standardised look is fine, I guess, but couldn't we zhuzh it up a bit?"

I didn't actually go to any of the gay bars, by the way.  I'm too old for all that now.  Also, when you're an old married twat like me, you realise that the main appeal of a gay bar is meeting other homosexual gentlemen, and if you're not looking for that it's just a bar.  There are bars everywhere.  I realise this goes against all that stuff I put up there about them being havens but two things can be true at once; I like that the gay bars exist for me, I just don't necessarily need to use them.  (This is, incidentally, one of a million reasons why the Lisbon in Liverpool is my favourite place to go; it's a pub first, a gay bar second, while still being massively homosexual).  

The Porta Venezia was one of the traditional gates of Milan, a spot for defence and also custom checks.  You can still see the outline of the city walls on maps of Milan, as a busy avenue has been built where it one stood, and in the original plans for the Metro there was going to be a circle line that followed it.  I crossed over by the Tommy Hilfiger store - the retail establishments were about to take a massive swing upmarket - and onto the Corso Venezia.

That magnificent building is Milan's Natural History Museum.  I realise this is deeply offensive to all of you reading this, but I didn't go to a single museum or historic building the whole time I was there.  It was all metro, all the time.  I'm so single minded about collecting stations everything else is irrelevant.  My reasoning is that I can go back any time as a tourist, but this was my only chance to visit as an obsessive station nerd.  That had to take priority.

Palestro, like all the stations in this post, was one of the originals, opening in 1964.  The M1 hits all the main attractions of the city centre, sweeping through and out the other side, as though they were anxious they wouldn't get a second line and had to make sure it did a lot of work.  (Although, strangely, it doesn't go to Centrale).

San Babila, however, is the crossover with one of the lines they did subsequently build: the M4.  It means that what was once a simple station has been gifted an interchange, turning it into a hub.  

The works for the new line gave the city an excuse to further pedestrianise large parts of the city centre, and the Piazza San Babila was almost doubled in size.  I emerged into a clean, open square, surrounded by classy shops.

There was a large Lego store on the corner, with a bricky World Cup trophy in its window.  I should note that, even though I was in Milan in the middle of the tournament, I barely knew it was on.  Italy failed to qualify for the 2026 cup and the nation seemed to have taken a collective decision to pretend it wasn't happening.  There weren't any rows of flag bunting outside bars, no winky tenuous tie ins in shops ("enjoy our football shaped sausage roll, not affiliated with any tournament currently running in North America").  The only places where it was represented were with global brands like Lego, where they had a corporate tie-in across the planet.  It was quite lovely, actually.  Next time there's a World Cup I might find a country who didn't get in and go there for the whole month.  

I turned to find my next station and let out a tiny excited yelp.  Venini Glass?

If you're a normal person, you might know Venini as a long-established, high-end producer of glassware.  Based in Venice, they have stores in Milan, Genoa, Rome and Bologna, as well as in centres for luxurious living like Dubai and Hong Kong.  

If you're not a normal person, if you are in fact a James Bond obsessive like me, then Venini means only one thing: the place where Hugo Drax makes the vials for his nerve gas, and which houses a museum of priceless glass antiquities that 007 absolutely destroys.  This is in Moonraker, one of the finest pieces of cinema ever made.  Snobs will tell you it's nonsense, but they are fools; Moonraker is two hours of pure pleasure.  James Bond goes into SPACE!  What's not to like?

I've only included this screengrab because it is fucking cool.

Of course that's the Venice store in the movie, not the one in front of me, but I was still thrilled.  (Milan actually doesn't appear in any Bond films; the only mention of it is in For Your Eyes Only, set in Cortina, when doomed MI6 agent Ferrara says "I'll ring my office in Milan" for more information on Columbo.  The Greek smuggler, not Peter Falk).  

If the store had been open, I'd have obviously gone inside and recreated the fight scene by smashing up all the extremely expensive glassware while raising an ironic eyebrow, but alas, it was early evening, and it was closed.  Shame.

I was heading for the Duomo, theoretically.  Venini Glass had distracted me, and now I was walking along what turned out to be the wrong street.  Being above the M4 it had been paved and benches and grass laid out to make it a pleasing place to wander.  I saw a group of people eating together, and thought they'd brought a picnic, until I realised it was a soup kitchen and all the people eating were homeless.  I'm quite thick sometimes.

I crossed over by San Bernardino alle Ossa, a church famous for having an ossuary; a chapel filled with skulls and bones.  They're arranged in attractive displays and with artistic flourish, and I think if you are going to let yourself rot away, may as well do it in a charming nook in a historic church.  Better than being buried forever to be forgotten.  (I, personally, want to have an alkaline bath once I die, and then my soupy remains can be tipped into the sewers).  The statue is of Pencho Slaveykov, a Bulgarian poet, and I cannot tell you how pleased I was that it was only his hand and knees and feet that had worn to a shine.  In this day of "doing stuff for internet likes" I can quite conceive of people molesting him for TikTok views.

I paused in a Carrefour to get another bottle of water - they had a sign by the fridges, in three languages: if you need more cheese, please ask the cashier, which is an incredibly Italian thing to announce - and then back into the side streets in search of the Duomo.

There it was: I'd finally managed to locate one of the largest and most impressive cathedrals in Europe.  Considering it is the literal centre of Milan, with streets radiating out of it, the fact that I'd failed to locate it was actually something of an achievement.  

Just a pair of funny little guys, hanging out on the side of the cathedral.  I followed the road then turned onto the piazza to take a look at it from the front.

I let out my second gasp of the evening.  (Ok, I admit it; my gasp for Venini Glass was probably a little bit more excited).  The Duomo, or to give it its full name, Cattedrale Metropolitana della Natività della Beata Vergine Maria, took six hundred years to build, only declared finished in 1965 (which means the Metro station with the same name opened a year before it was completed).  It's an incredible piece of architecture, intricate and yet not overwhelming, every niche and tower decorated with some twist or statue.

The honey glow it had acquired from the late evening sun only added to its beauty.  I'd be back in the piazza a few days later, when I collected the M3, but the memory I'll retain of the Duomo is that first glimpse.  I stood and stared at it for a while, taking in the details, snapping photos, then I walked back through the crowds to the Metro station.

As the stop by the city's most famous attraction, as well as the interchange between two lines, Duomo is unsurprisingly one of its busiest stations.  It also spreads further across the adjoining streets, with entrances dotted across different corners and roads.  Inside, it got a makeover for the arrival of the M3 twenty five years after the M1 was built, and, combined with the neon glow of the new ticket barriers installed recently, it gives the ticket hall a wonderfully trippy air.

It's like Stanley Kubrick designed a metro station.

The hop to Cordusio was my shortest yet: the two stations are 340 metres apart. There's even a passageway connecting their mezzanines.  Strict Merseytart Rules dictate that a train must be taken to or from the station, however, so even though it would've been quicker to walk, I rode there.

Piazza Cordusio is an oval crossing point at the foot of Via Dante, surrounded by shops and restaurants.  Trams dinged their way past me to the nearby interchange.  Opposite was an FAO Schwarz; I didn't even know they had branches, never mind one in Europe.  A bit of digging taught me that the brand's gone under a couple of times, and is now owned by an anonymous corporation who've farmed the name out to department stores and the odd standalone.  I also learned that the famous store on Fifth Avenue - which I've been to; I bought my brother a Star Wars toy from there (he was 19 at the time) - and which appeared in Big is long closed.  It's now an Apple store, because joy is dead.

British cities are, in the main, Medieval, their streets evolving over centuries as a mishmash of closes and narrow lanes.  An overly servile devotion to the wishes of landowners means that they rarely got replanned around new avenues and boulevards; Christopher Wren was famously thwarted in his scheme to redefine the City after the Great Fire.  In Europe, however, the influence of, shall we say, dominant political leaders, means that comprehensive rebuilds of entire cities were possible.  It means that a city like Milan can routinely offer up a long, impressive avenue that looks absolutely incredible on a summer's evening.

The Via Dante was built in the late 19th centuries and lined with mansion blocks.  Each one was subject to strict specifications to ensure a conformity of style and shape, but a prize was offered to encourage architects to be brave with the decoration.  Now it's a long pedestrian artery (although traffic used it until the 1990s) lined with restaurants.  The street seating was filling up nicely and people perused the menus at their leisure.  It was, admittedly, extremely touristy - one of the restaurants on offer was the Hard Rock Cafe - but that didn't stop it from being a wonderful place to saunter.

The terminus of Via Dante is the tower of the Castello Sforzesco, once the city's main defensive hub.  The original plan was that the street would continue right through it - the castle had lost its purpose by the 19th century, and was seen as a blight to be demolished - but instead it was restored by the architect Luca Beltrami.  He brought it back as a place of pride for the city, and converted the parade ground at the rear into an extensive parkland.  I wandered around it towards the end of the week, and it's a beautiful spot to visit.

The fountain you can just about see there was lost to the construction of the Metro in the sixties; it wasn't restored until 1999.

(This post is really dragging on, isn't it?  I should've made it two separate ones.  I got bogged down in Moonraker.  There's only three stations left though.  We can make it through together.)

As a point where the M1 meets the M2, as well as the terminus for mainline railway services, Cadorna's got a larger and more impressively constructed ticket hall.  The square outside has been covered with a glass roof, too, giving you a lovely place to loiter for your taxi.

It's a very Eighties-looking roof, which is odd, because it dates from the Millennium and the introduction of a direct line to Malpensa airport.  I was finding this happening a lot, that the architectural style said a particular era to me and then it turned out to be a decade later.  This roof screamed early Docklands Light Railway to me and here it was being Jubilee Line Extension vintage.  It was as if Milan's transport authorities wanted to make sure it had got a good working out somewhere else before they'd approve its use here.

Darkness was really starting to creep in around the edges as I disappeared into the local streets.  The theme here seemed to be "quiet wealth".  The apartment blocks around me were heavy and ornate, discreetly exuding power and money.  Through the glass entrance doors I glimpsed elegant courtyards and marble steps.  Door buzzers were mounted on brass plates.

There were office blocks too, with subtle plaques confirming the presence of doctors or lawyers or architects.  The kind of business that would have a walnut panelled waiting room and a receptionist who looked like she was doing this as a filler job between catwalks.

There were people walking about, women wrapped in shawls, men in casual suits, off for a meal at one of the restaurants tucked into a tree-lined avenue.  A dad hauled his stroppy little girl along, whispering gently coaxing words, while she had a face like thunder.

The metro station was tucked underneath Piazza de Conciliazione, and I wondered how many times the people who lived round here actually used it.  Still, the staff have to get here somehow, right?

Down the steps, down to the platform, the train filled with people off for a night out now, even though it was Sunday.  The European mindset of the evening not beginning until nine pm at least.

Here it was then; the final stop for me on the M1: Pagano.  Not the most auspicious of finish lines, if I'm honest.  

Pagano's greatest asset is the large car park next door - something of a let down after the castles and cathedrals of its predecessors.  Still, in the setting sun, even that acquired a certain charm.

One very hot sweaty day, but that was it: thirty eight stations crossed off, about a third of the entire network.  I should have gone back down to get the train home but I decided on the scenic route.

Milan is crisscrossed with tram lines, mostly operated by ramshackle single cars that look like they haven't been updated for decades.  I waited by the stop with a Spanish family, laden down with their shopping, for the number 10, which would take me right the way back to Milano Centrale.

Inside there was a warm wooden interior and a hard bench to sit on.  It careened round the tracks, the driver seemingly believing that going as fast as possible between the stops was the key to getting about, with the pleasing ding of a bell whenever someone wanted a stop.  The 10 tracked around the edge of the city centre, taking its time, and when I reached the terminus it had gone dark.

What a day.  What a lot of journeys.  What a lot of journeys still to come.