Yellow Fever

Told you the seats would be worth the wait.  STOOLS!  Mushroom-y stools!  And they're red, to make them stand out.  Admittedly the passenger ghosts on the wall are disappointing but still, how great are they?  All of the M3 stations have them and they're ace.

When you step out of Porto Romana station it becomes obvious why this one got to keep the name and the mainline one had to change.  This is what you see straight away.

The gate dates from 1596 and was one of the entry points through the city walls.  Sadly it's on a traffic island now, so I entered the historic centre of Milan via a series of pedestrian crossings instead, ending up on the Corso di Porto Romana.

The tarmac became cobbles, inlaid with tram tracks, narrower than the avenues I'd been used to.  Men on a cherry picker repainted the side of one of the buildings a bright canary yellow.  Gaps between the buildings were adorned with LED screens beaming out ads.  It was Wimbledon, and so Ralph Lauren posters were everywhere, replacing the football ones that dominated in the countries that actually qualified for the World Cup.

Crocetta station is on a small triangle of land where two larger streets become one.  It's the closest station to Sforza-Policlinico, on the M4, and at one point there was planned to be an underground interchange.  Instead, the next station Missori was chosen as the crossover point, though the actual interchange was cancelled, and you have to pass through the ticket barriers and walk through the streets to make the change.

I used my visit to Crocetta to coo over the light fittings.

Look how pretty they are in the ceiling!  And that ceiling itself; so interesting and practical!

Being extremely positive is tiring, guys.  I much prefer being a cynical bastard.

By now I was on the central section of the M3, where the tunnels are laid above one another to minimise the interference with the historic fabric of the city.  You got a clue about why that was important at Missori station.

Do you think Italians hate building stuff?  Does it constantly wind them up that they can't so much as dig over their garden without discovering another priceless archaeological horde?  "All I wanted to do was plant some petunias and I inadvertently unearthed a long-lost Roman amphitheatre."  I wonder how many times they've started the foundations for a building, found a perfectly preserved forum, then quietly covered it back up again so they could get on with construction.  

At Missori it's the base of a house and some ancient sewer systems, dug up when the metro came through and preserved behind glass in the link tunnels.  I, being an ignorant tourist, was the only one actually pausing to look at them.

I climbed the steps to emerge in the Piazza Giuseppe Missori, now properly in the centre of Milan again.  I'd already skirted the area doing the M1, but that had been in the evening; I was here in the day, looking at the most famous sights of the city.

As I walked north, I realised why Milan hadn't really stolen my heart like Amsterdam, Stockholm and Helsinki had before them.  Milan, I realised, was Manchester.  It was a very good Manchester, it was actually a better version of Manchester, but it was still Manchester.  A big industrial city that prioritised commerce over everything else.

Manchester is a nice enough place to live and work but you wouldn't really want to go on holiday there, would you?  Milan is the same.  Though it's got centuries of history behind it, there's a certain amount of grim faced capitalism running through its heart.  When it built, it built for superlatives; the biggest, the tallest, the widest, not the most beautiful.  

It was telling that the guidebooks I looked at before I came here were almost all "Milan... and also the Italian Lakes".  There was a clear hint that the most interesting places to visit might actually be outside of the city. 

I should emphasise that I did enjoy my time in Milan, and it's absolutely worth visiting, and it's a Manchester only in the loosest sense.  Compare and contrast its cathedral with Manchester's and you realise they're not in the same league.  There's a reason why Milan had recently successfully hosted an Olympic Games and Manchester has failed to get close not once, but twice.  And this is Milan's version of the Arndale:

The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II is the most famous shopping street in the city.  The foundation stone was laid in 1865, though it wasn't completed for another thirteen years, and it swiftly became a centrepiece for Milanese society: a place to perambulate and be seen.  It was one of the earliest shopping malls and it's striking how much it established the style - the tall shops, the marble arcades, the glass roof with the dome.  This is what the Trafford Centre wishes it could be.

It was bombed during the war, and had to be extensively rebuilt; it was restored again ahead of Expo 2015.  One mosaic has to be regularly restored; the arms of Turin on the floor include a bull, and there's a tradition that spinning your heel on its testicles will give you good luck.  This means there's a drill effect on the tiles and they keep having to be relaid.  The most recent restoration caused controversy because the bull's testicles weren't as prominent as they used to be, and there had to be redo to make sure the bullock's bollocks were as magnificent as they were intended to be.

The shops lean heavily towards the elite, with some of them being recognised as historic in themselves.  There isn't a Greggs, let's put it that way.  

Look closely at the very pinnacle of the central dome and you can see that some local scrotes have decided to decorate it with black spray paint.  I know we're meant to be very considerate to these inner city youths, reach out to them and teach them, give them diversions to stop them from committing crimes, but I think when they're out vandalising internationally renowned historic landmarks, a good hard tasering to the crotch may be called for.  There's no excuse for it at all.  If they'd slipped and slid all the way down that dome to the ground I would produce, at most, a shrug.

The Galleria links the Piazza del Duomo with the Piazza della Scala, connecting Milan's two most iconic structures with one of its own.  The Palazzo Marino, the city hall, is at one end, and they still had the Olympic rings mounted outside.  On the other side is the Teatro alla Scala, the opera house, and one of the most important cultural institutions in Europe.

La Scala hosted the premieres of the likes of Otello and Madama Butterfly and we have now exhausted all my knowledge of the artform of opera.  It's one of those things I think I should perhaps look into, get myself a nice recording of something not very complex and sit down with the lyrics and try and appreciate it, but who has the time?  Especially now Strictly's back.  I know from Pretty Woman that you're not truly classy until you go to the opera for the first time and are so moved to shed a single, cinematic tear to symbolise your transition from hooker to debutante.  If any Richard Geres are out there and willing to take me I'm up for it.  

I was now in the Fashion District, the heart of Italian elegance, the core of extremely highly priced elegant clothing shops.  Once again, like Julia Roberts, I was distinctly out of place among these temples of style, though sadly I will never get to strut into Valentino for my "Big mistake.  Huge." moment.  I am physically incapable of paying that sort of money for clothes.  If I won the EuroMillions and was in Milan with £100 million in my pocket I still couldn't bring myself to fork out, say, £695 for a black t-shirt with silver tape embroidered on it.   That is simply ludicrous.  You could get a decent minibreak for that money.  It's obscene.

I'm clearly in the minority about this, because the whole area was awash with people carrying extremely expensive carrier bags, but on the plus side when the revolution comes I'll be with the proletariat helping to put them up against the walls to be shot.

Montenapoleone station is on a small square between the Grand Hotel et Milan and the Hotel Armani.  The former was where artists and composers traditionally stayed before performing at La Scala.  Verdi had a suite here, still in use today, and it was where he suffered the stroke that would kill him in 1901.  The Hotel Armani is much newer, unsurprisingly.  As I passed the restaurant two obvious models came walking out.  I'd never been that close to a model before and they are truly not of this earth; taller than me, barely in three dimensions, their faces so carefully crafted you could've immediately turned them into statues.  They held the tiniest handbags and carried with them a clear disdain for the rest of humanity and honestly, fair.  If I looked that flawless and I had to spend my days around the toad people who form the rest of my species I'd get a bit annoyed.

Look at the state of that.  Gross.

Have I talked about the station toilets yet?  I should talk about the toilets.  They're housed in an alcove behind these amazing red glass doors.  I didn't actually go in them, because a public toilet in an underground station is rarely a place one wants to visit, but look at those lovely doors.

And look at these wonderful circular voids in the checkerboard walls.  They could've put in a boring old opening to let light and air through but instead they put in portholes.

Magnificent.

One train ride later and I was at Turati, heading outside under another of those bright yellow ceilings that will never get old to me.

I paused to take my usual photo with the sign on the steps, but as I lined up the camera, I became aware that there was a slight tension in the air around me.  There was a bit of a crowd up ahead, and I could see policemen.

The building right next to the metro stop is the American consulate, and a series of hefty security structures have been put in place to keep it safe.  Part of the pavement has been reconfigured with covered walkways and a small glass porch houses the first wave of checks before you're permitted inside.  I hustled past quickly before they noticed my camera and assumed I was some sort of terrorist, ending up on the Piazzi Stati Uniti d'America, named as a tribute after 9/11.  (Amusingly, Via Della Moscova runs right through it). 

The Via Filipo Turati takes you north, and then the road suddenly opens out into the massive Piazza della Republica.  

This isn't a square, in the traditional sense, but is instead more of a massive open air meeting spot.  Wide avenues cross over one another, separated by acres of grass and trees.  Trams come and go to interchange and terminate.  Pedestrians scurry over the various crossings, moving from one island to the next, held up again and again while another stream of traffic pours by.  It's an epic piece of urban design.

I dodged and crossed and finally ended up by an entrance to the metro, handily located by a tram stop for effortless transfers.

All that space up top meant that Repubblica station could be even more open and gorgeous than its siblings on the M3.

Incredible.  I could live here.  Not the city, I mean specifically inside this metro station.  

My next station, finally, was Centrale.  I'd skipped it when I did the M2 because that was already an overwhelming length of line to cover.  Now I could give it the attention it deserved.

We're gonna need a bigger blog.

Yellow Pearl

 

The heat finally broke overnight.  A cataclysmic storm hit Milan, lightning flashing behind the slab of the Pirelli Tower, my hotel room shaking with the thunder.  It battered the city, drove rain into every crevice, drowned it.

And yet, by next morning, there was no sign of it.  The streets were dry and the sky was blue again.  The only indicator that something had changed was the slight wisp of wind that cut across open areas and the heat being that little bit less intense.  It was as though it had been tamed.

I was only just outside Milan proper, in the adjoining municipality of San Donato, where a bus station had been slotted in above the metro and alongside the motorways.  It was shabbier than most, its cafes fronted with plastic chairs, a loose market selling cheap clothes at one end.  I passed through the local platforms, then out past a newer building for long-distance services.  There were already queues of people waiting there with suitcases.  I went out, over the bus access ramps and the motorway junctions, and past the M3's depot.

It was an unfriendly place for pedestrians.  Footpaths weaved between thick bunches of yellow grass.  I passed under road signs and kicked litter out of the way.  A cluster of pigeons fed frenziedly on a patch in the grass - I didn't look too closely, hoping it was discarded fast food and not the corpse of something.  Or someone.  

Beyond the viaducts and bridges I got the sign for the Milan clean-air zone and I was back in the city itself.  Thin homes stretched along the roadside, parked cars wedged against the kerb.  There was a bit of culture being inserted into this space, a new campus for the Milan Conservatory, with a building site promising elaborate architectural shenanigans that were yet to appear above ground.

Around Rogoredo station a series of glass blocks appeared, the campus for Sky Italia.  I'm not sure if Sky is the channel responsible for that terrible stereotype about Italian telly, that it's nothing but housewives taking their clothes off, but since it was Rupert Murdoch adjacent I'm choosing to believe it is.  (It's now owned by Comcast, who own Universal, and NBC, and who are probably also appalling for many other, different reasons).  I didn't actually watch any Italian TV while I was there - I had my laptop to keep me amused - and so I can't tell you if their telly is now extremely classy and expensive and full of costume dramas and nature documentaries but given the way the rest of the media landscape has changed, I very much doubt it.

Rogoredo's another mainline station with the metro underneath.  It was getting on for nine am, so there weren't too many commuters rushing for the train, but I still negotiated around the suits to get my shot at the entrance.

I went down the steps into the wonderful world of the M3.

The M1 and the M2 were perfunctory, with some dated charm but not much to really distinguish it.  The M5 was clean and new but also a tiny bit dull.  

The M3, however, is one hundred percent fantastic.  Approved in the late 70s and constructed throughout the 80s, it's both of its time and modern, unique and fascinating.  The city took a look at what had worked and what hadn't on its original pair of metro lines and created a new pattern for stations.  They're still uniform along the line, with the same colour palette and design, but it's so much more exciting and vibrant.

Look at the walls, for example.  Other stations have bare, smooth walls, or fibreglass panels.  Stations on the M3 have wonderful textured concrete, divided into squares, both practical (try graffiti-ing that!) and attractive.

And those ceilings!  Yellow grids with bold, bright light bulbs.  More lighting around the edges to guide you.  The colour telling you exactly where you are and where you're going.  I love it.

There's the space you'd expect from the Milan Metro - room to move and circulate - but it feels so much more open and friendly.  There aren't the dark black corners that plagued the M1 and M2.  Those dull blue walls on the Gessate extension are far behind us.

Out again at the next station, Porto di Mare, a nautical-sounding name considering we were closer to the Alps than the sea.  It's a hangover from an early 20th century scheme to build a harbour and ship canal that would reach the river Po via Cremona.  That would enable vessels to travel from the Adriatic directly to Milan.  Work started in 1917, then over the course of the following century it stopped and restarted every twenty years or so.  It's still, officially, somewhere on the books, but unsurprisingly building a massive canal isn't top of anyone's infrastructure wants in an era of trucks and aeroplanes.

It was another down-at-heel neighbourhood, dominated by a fast autostrada that shadowed the main road.  Tags covered the bare walls and tiny minimarts that stocked everything and nothing sat at the base of the apartment blocks.  Even so, there were still people sat out on chairs on the narrow strip of tarmac, drinking coffees and smoking.  We try to adopt the pavement cafe culture in the UK, but restrict it to safe pedestrian areas and squares; British people wouldn't dream of having their breakfast in such an unfriendly location, which is why we will never truly be European.

The motorway had swept up onto stilts so that it could cross the Piazzale Luigi Emanuele Corvetti without being interfered with, leaving the passenger space underneath in darkness.  It was occupied by parking for scooters - how official this was I couldn't say - and spraypainted artworks on the concrete struts.

After my experience with Sidney Poitier and the CIA I'm slightly afraid that Steve McQueen and aliens is another conspiracy rabbit hole.

The lift shaft for the station at (Just One) Corvetto is more great 80s design.  I always loved a payphone with a curved outer edge; the most exciting ones were the ones with that perspex bubble like something out of Space: 1999.  The architects must've thought they were so forward thinking and modern, combining public transport with public communication.  Now it's a remnant of a lost world, like a horse trough on a village green or a post box for Air Mail.  I imagine there are teenagers - maybe actual adults - who have no idea what that curved shelter was for.

The station carried a relic below.  The Metro's stations are unstaffed, with passes dispensed from machines; even their time is up, because all the ticket gates have tap in and out pads and in my casual observation this was easily the most common way people paid.  (The exception was at Centrale, where there was always a queue of tourists for the machines; a member of staff telling them not to bother would pay for itself).  

The Biglietti counter is still in place at Corvetto but is no longer in use, which is a shame, because once again look at that gorgeous design.  No amount of stroppy passengers could distract me from the joy of working behind a circular window.

On to Brenta, and let's take a closer look at those handrails shall we?

Wonderful.  I'm sorry, so much of the M3 is going to be me cooing over yellow and red bits of street furniture.  It'll be even more boring than usual.

I don't know why Brenta's text is in black and the others in white.  That's annoying.  There you go, an actual negative.

Brenta is only a couple of blocks down from Corvetto but it felt like a shift change now that the motorway had peeled off.  The streets were busier, packed even, and trees shaded me as I walked.  It was undeniably a much nicer place to be.

Scalo Romana mainline station was upgraded ahead of the Winter Olympics and, in the process, got a name change.  For the first hundred years of its life, it was Porto Romana, named after the city gate of the same name that's about a kilometre down the road.  When the metro line was built however, there was a station literally underneath the gate, so that naturally got called Porto Romana as well.  Milan now had two stations of the same name that weren't in any way convenient for one another and so last year they finally changed it.

There is a metro station right across the road from the mainline one, of course, but that's not called Porto Romano.  It's not called Scalo Romano either.  It's called Lodi TIBB.

TIBB stood for Tecnomasio Italiano-Brown Boveri, the name of a train manufacturing company who had a vast railway yard here.  Merger after merger throughout the later half of the twentieth century left it a part of Alstom, I think? To be honest the trail seems to ebb and flow, and as with so much to do with traction engines, I found it incredibly dull.

What's much more interesting is that the closure of the railworks has left a massive stretch of unused industrial land which is being reclaimed as the new district of Scalo Romana.  The Olympic Village was built here, and has recently been converted to student accommodation, while a new skyscraper (the Torre A2A) will house new headquarters for a big utility company.  There will also be parkland, apartments, and new roads to reconnect what was once a huge scar.

The Lodi part of Lodi TIBB, by the way, is the name of the square it's under, Piazzale Lodi.

We'll leave it there for a while I think.  I don't want to overwhelm you with my gushing.  Do check back for a future blog post where I wax about the seating on the platforms.  No, I promise you: they're great!