Red Heat

 

I think of myself as a reasonable man of the world, one with a certain amount of cynicism and weariness about what goes on.  Then something happens and I get a reminder that no, I am in fact a tiny naïf who probably shouldn't be allowed out on his own.

I was on the M1 headed across the city, and a man was stood beside me with his suitcase.  He had neat, trimmed nails, apart from the little finger on his right hand, which I realised was a coke fingernail.  I was scandalised.  Was it 1976?  Was I at Studio 54?  This man was on public transport, where people could see him, with a clear indicator that he was a gentleman who used illicit substances.  If I had been wearing pearls, I would absolutely have clutched them.  

Reeling, I staggered off the train at the end of the line at Sesto 1º Maggio FS.  I'd gone from Rho Fieramilano right to the opposite end of the M1; with two branches closed off, it was time to do the rest.  The station was in something of a state.  It's connected to a mainline station and that station has been completely demolished for a comprehensive rebuild.  (The mainline station is called Sesto S. Giovanni, after the town itself; the metro station is named after the square outside).

This is part of a huge regeneration project currently underway.  On the other side of the tracks there was once the Falck steelworks, which closed in the 1990s.  After decades work is finally in progress to turn it into a new district planned by, of course, Foster & Partners.  You can''t arrive at some manky old station for your new shiny development so the whole thing had to be reconstructed, this time by Renzo Piano, because there are only about six architecture firms in the whole world.  

As with a lot of Italian public works projects, it's running late, to the extent that nobody seems very sure when it will be finished.  Still, next to the M1 northern extension it's positively leaping ahead.   That consists of two stations, one at Sesto Restello and a new terminus at Cinsello-Bettola.  Approved in the early 2010s, the original idea was to have it up and running by the Milan Expo in 2015.  Works didn't actually begin until 2014, so the opening date was put off for a bit.  It now has a projected opening date of 2029, after multiple problems with the contractors lead to it having to be re-tendered - even though large portions of the stations were complete.  You can see Cinsello-Bettola quite clearly on Google Earth, quietly rotting while it waits for new workmen to turn up.

The Milanese authorities have recently approved an eleven line extension of the M5, which should interchange at Cinsello-Bettola, so presumably the works will soon begin again.  Let's hope they planned ahead when building what they did. so that a second line can be easily incorporated, otherwise they'll have to knock the whole thing down and start again.

The area around the station was a chaotic mess, not helped by the obvious difference in economies between Sesto and the rest of Milan.  As in the UK, the closure of the steelworks hit the city hard, knocking wages and raising unemployment.  The depression in living costs made the city attractive for immigrants, and quietly it shifted from being a staunchly trade union town to one that elected a right wing mayor.

Other industries have departed Sesto.  Campari was once made in the town, and while the headquarters remains, the factory is now a museum.  Being from Luton, I of course have a close personal relationship with Campari, as it's the drink that put us on the map - not necessarily the intent of the advert, but there you go.

I was disappointed to go to the Campari website and find an entire section about the brand's advertising history and its association with cinema and not a single mention of Lorraine Chase being wafted in from paradise.  They try to be all sophisticated these days - Salma Hayek did an ad for them - but in Britain, if you ordered a Campari, at least one person in the bar will say "Luton Airport!".  They probably won't pronounce the Ts, mind.

I've never actually had a Campari.  It comes under the same category as Cinzano (another great advert of course) and Martini Rosso: drinks you wouldn't dream of ordering in a pub because you'll get called a poof.  What you need is someone to have a sophisticated drinks cabinet from which you can sample various different aperitifs, but I don't have friends like that.  You're lucky if you get milk in your tea with most of them.

I carried on, past the Campari factory and the Bar Campari, over a grid that went straight down to the M1; there was a slight breeze, but I didn't do the full Marilyn.  Unlike in Milan, the shops in Sesto didn't seem keen to open for Sunday trading, not even the Carrefour.  It left the streets feeling sleepy and empty.

A more pertinent explanation for the lack of activity was that it was midday and roasting hot and only mad dogs and Englishmen would be out in it.  I imagined people peering over their balconies, watching me walk by and wondering what was wrong with me, then realising "aha.  Inglese!"

I'd reached the centre of the town, as far as it seemed; a busy gyratory with shops surrounding it.  I crossed the various arms with a large, slightly irate family, who didn't seem to want to be going anywhere and were complaining about it the whole time.

The Metro can sometimes be a cold, dark place to descend into.  Passageways under the roads branch and branch again, leaving you disoriented, while corners conceal who knows what.  The repeated audio messages to be aware of pickpockets don't help with the atmosphere.  Every time I took the steps a part of me wondered what I would find, though I experienced no problems with crime or safety at all; a couple of beggars, the odd person pushing through the ticket barriers, the low level criminality you get in any big city.  

Sesto Marelli was my third station in the city of Sesto, and another one that was a terminus for a while - in this case, between 1964 and 1986.  

Though you wouldn't know to look at it today, Marelli had to be comprehensively rebuilt twenty years after the rest of the line following an arson attack in 1982.  The "Offensive Proletarian Revolutionary Movement" set fire to the padded seats on a train that terminated here; it quickly spread and the entire station went up.  This was when Sesto S. Giovanni was at its most lefty.  It took only five months to have it up and running again.

It does remind you that Milan's commitment to a unified, standardised look for its stations, while great from a budgetary perspective, is a bit disappointing if you're an architecture fan.  If there was an arson attack on a British railway station it would be rebuilt in a then contemporary style, and now it would be so gloriously 1980s you wouldn't be able to pass through without getting a whiff of hairspray.

I came out of the station onto another long, straight, road (wow it's almost as if the Romans were big around here or something).  I was crossing from the city of Sesto into the city of Milan, and large signs warned me about a congestion charge coming into effect.  The border was marked by a gleaming glass building, as though Milan wanted to underline how modern it was next to its rube neighbours, while beyond apartment blocks alternated with low stores and industrial blocks.

There was barely any shade.  I clung to the right hand side of the street, where the walls and fences cast a small, half metre of darkness that could keep me cool.  When I reached a car park, lined with trees, I was practically giddy; I walked under the branches, enjoying the respite, past a Mondo Mini Market which I imagine sold nothing but the bloodiest hunks of meat chopped by a man with a machete and a grunt.

From here on, the stations appeared with startling regularity, every half a kilometre or so.  I'd barely have gathered my thoughts about the last one before the red M appeared on the horizon again.

Villa S.Giovanni made me feel about eight hundred years old.  There was a photo booth in the ticket hall, and it advertised its wares with the slogan Foto Vintage!  I realised that the concept of using a photo booth was like having a man with a big moustache making you stand still for five minutes while he hid under a blanket and fired a bolt of gunpowder.  It was being sold as a trip back in time rather than anything practical.  

Fortunately there was a far friendlier and more modern machine for me.  These vending machines were scattered all along the M1, and they were an absolute god send for me.  A couple of taps, the ding of my phone against the bar, and I had an ice cold drink in my hands.  The BF and I share a credit card when we're abroad and he messaged me to query all the tiny amounts that were showing up on it, worried that it was one of those hacks where they take a few pence to test the water then hit you for five grand.  I explained no, it was just that whenever I saw one of these, I bought myself another cooler.  (Coke Zero, more often than not: number 32).

The system showing its age a bit there.  The Metro is sixty-odd years old now, crafted largely out of concrete, and it's of a vintage where I imagine there are discussions about refurbishment throughout.  The M2 was undergoing work as I was there, and they recently announced that the whole Cologno branch will close for a month so that work can be carried out on the concrete viaducts that carry it.  

I had a precotto for dessert in a restaurant once.  Like a set custard.  Lovely.  

More hot, steaming walking.  My t-shirt was wet through; I looked like I'd been for a swim.  Which wouldn't have been so bad if there were sweaty Italians as well, but apparently nobody else in Milan felt the heat, and they all wafted around in light separates looking refreshed and wholesome.  Meanwhile, here I was, Jabba the Hutt, sidling up behind them on the train and leaving drips on the seats.

The street opened out into a wide triangle of parking and there was no escape from the merciless sun.  I was sweating so much I was dehydrated; I'd drunk about eight litres of liquid over the course of the red line, and I hadn't so much as thought about urinating.  When I finally got back to the hotel and forced some pee out it was thick and green.  Every bit of water I poured into myself immediately came straight back out my sweat glands.

There was a plaque at Gorla commemorating a man named Renato Briano.  Usually, in the UK, this is a tribute to a loyal railworker, or a victim of a terrible accident.  Briano, on the other hand, was assassinated by members of the Red Brigades in 1980, which was a bit of a shock to discover.  It's easy to forget that Europe in the 1970s was plagued by bombs and terrorists and assassinations on a large scale; that anarchists were detonating shopping centres and shooting politicians across the entire continent.  The 21st century is nothing special for having terrorist attacks, it's just a different source.

Swipe my phone, through the barriers, steps, platform, train, platform, steps, through the barriers, back up to street level, and here was Turro.

I was seriously flagging now.  I'd been out since 8am, remember, and the day had only got warmer and more brutal.  I paused under some trees by the side of the road and guzzled an entire bottle of water in an extremely undignified fashion, until I spotted two teenage boys walk round the corner and approach me.  I attempted to gain a look of decency so they wouldn't spot my flaws and beat me up, or worse, laugh.

None of the Viale Monza had been what you'd call exclusive.  It was, essentially, a dual carriageway for getting traffic out of the city and off to the nearby regions.  The homes and shops had been working class, functional, but now I was reaching the inner city.  The graffiti became more frequent and more prominent, the litter ramped up, and the stores felt that little bit darker and less hospitable.

The presence of railway bridges didn't help.  Nothing good happens under a railway bridge.  They're noisy, dark spots for people to lurk in.  I welcomed the brief moment of shade as I passed under, but couldn't help noticing the young woman seemingly hanging out there for no real reason.  She was wearing a crop top and tight shorts and had a fan pointed at her face, and maybe she was just enjoying the respite from the sun too, but equally there was a chance she wasn't.

A second railway bridge - there are extensive depots round here, plus the approaches to Milano Centrale - and then another commemorative plaque: this time to the victims of a fire in a private cinema in 1983.  A pair of neo-Nazis burned it down to demonstrate their superiority over the "unworthy," killing five patrons and a sixth person who was trying to help.  The fact that it was a pornographic cinema lead to a level of stigmatisation of the victims, and the totem was put there forty years later in an attempt to mark that, yeah, they didn't actually deserve to die for watching a mucky movie.

The cinema is now an evangelical church.  Personally I think a film showing pornos probably has a net better influence on society than organised religion but that might just be me.

What is there to say about Rovereto that couldn't equally apply to any of the other stations on the Viale Monza?  

Pass.

Pasteur station is currently subject to discussion about getting a name change.  People are concerned that commemorating the works of a great man who prevented the unnecessary death and illness of millions gives out the impression that pasteurized milk is something to be supported.  It's going to be renamed RFK, and then everyone can drink poisoned milk and love it.

(It's not really, that was my feeble attempt at satire, but give it time.)

This was going to be my last stretch of the M1 for the time being, I decided.  I needed to go somewhere there was air conditioning and lie down.  Yes, there were still a load of stations to go, but they could wait.  I'd get to Loreto and then go back to the hotel.

It was important to me to get to the Piazzale Loreto because that was a pivotal spot in Italy's World War II history.  At the western end is the Monumento ai Martiri P.le Loreto - the Monument to the Martyrs of Loreto.

In 1944, during the occupation of Northern Italy, a German military truck was blown up, allegedly by the Italian Resistance.  No Germans were killed - in fact the only casualties were six Milanese citizens - and subsequent investigations have suggested it was a deliberate false flag so they could crack down on the partisans.  They did so in an extremely brutal fashion, taking fifteen resistance men from a prison and shooting them in the Piazzale Loreto at dawn on the 10th August 1944.

The bodies were left in the sun all day, guarded by the SS to ensure they weren't moved.  Fascists were encouraged to defile them while passers by were forced to look at them.  They were an example of what happened to resisters.  (The leader of the shooting, by the way, then collaborated with the CIA and got a series of good jobs in the government of West Germany; he wasn't tried for the murders until 1999).  The brutality actually had the opposite effect, scarring the minds of the people of Milan, and inciting further resistance.  

The Piazza Loreto then became home to another display of corpses eight months later.  On April 27th, 1945, Benito Mussolini was caught trying to escape Italy at Giulino di Mezzegra near Lake Como.  He and his entourage were executed and their bodies sent to Milan.  In an act of vengeance, the bodies were strung up for the public to abuse at the same spot the martyrs had been murdered: the corner of Viale Andrea Doria and Corso Buenos Aires on Piazza Loreto.  There's no statue to mark that, as you'd expect, and the spot has been subsequently redeveloped.  In fact, what's there now is... a McDonalds.

If I'd have been in a better state, I'd have gone in and had a special Anti-Fascist Big Mac with a side of Fuck You Mussolini Fries.   Instead I headed straight for Loreto station, one of the most important on the network as the interchange between the M1 and M2.  

Loreto's had a slight makeover compared to its brethren on the M1; it's lost the rubber floor and acquired a zig-zag light feature that brings a welcome dash of colour to the ceiling.

I descended to the M2, the lower of the levels, for my train home.  The rest of the line could wait.  I needed a shower.

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.