Milan

After we arrive at Malpensa airport, we get tickets for a shuttle bus to the central train station in Milan.  The full size bus at the shuttle stop is half enclosed by a semicircle of travelers—a tail of travelers extends to the baggage claim doors.  The bus is loaded and leaves soon after we arrive at the shuttle stop; the bus departure leaves still the large semicircle of travelers to wait for the next bus.  It pulls-up in ten minutes. 

As the fresh shuttle unloads, the passengers move to retrieve bags from the cargo bays—at the same time ticketed passengers anxious to board shove their bags into the bus.  In this pandemonium, the driver pushes through the crowd; he throws his arms and spews angry Italian.  The driver pulls luggage from the cargo bay and pushes people back.  He reloads luggage piece by piece.  He hollers at people.  His voice is harsh.  His scold is hot.  When I lift my bag to make it easier for him to grab, he scolds me too.

There is an uncomfortable hour in the tight seats of the hot and airless bus that becomes cold and airless as we bounce past a woodland of birches and patches of pines in the airport’s countryside.  The landscape becomes industrial as we find an autostrada then shift to another.  We enter a nondescript city.  Apartments and restaurants.  Farmacias and tabacchis.  It’s a miscellany along the tight streets that have heavy traffic.

*

We return by train, arriving in Milan as we had ten days earlier in the early afternoon.  The Stazione Centrale is a little hell; there are no shadows; every motion bangs and echoes.  Lines are long.  The toilets need correct change.  We can’t make the telephones work, and no one knows how many numbers should be dialed.  We stow our bags at the train station and take the subway to the Duomo. 

After days in Tuscany, where the marble facades of the mildly subdued churches seem mostly odd because of their colors, sometimes green or pink or both, the cathedral in Milan is shocking.  Its ornate Gothic façade recalls French cathedrals.  [Is Milan really a Paris suburb?] The Piazza Duomo is a pigeon place.  The birds are so tame and dense it is difficult not to step on them.  The people are similar.  A hawker badgers us to buy cheap bracelets.  “No,” we say and shake our heads, but still he follows us; his sales song repeats.  He throws a bracelet onto my folded arms as I walk.

The Duomo has a skirt of sales banners. We face the façade, contemplate going in, but indecision sends us outward.   Through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, through posh, expensive Milan, where the men at café tables wear good suits, we emerge at Piazza Scala with its statue of Leonardo and take a turn up the Via Giuseppe Verdi to look for lunch.  The Café Verdi has its windows hung with familiar posters of Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn among photographs of divas.  The image cacophony draws us in.

We return after lunch and a walk through the artful neighborhoods near the Brera gallery to the Duomo, to the subway, to the Stazione Centrale.  We get tickets for the shuttle bus to the airport.  The driver loads bags.  He is calm and tells us where to depart at the airport to get a shuttle to our hotel.  It’s dark when the bus leaves the train station.  The streets are lit by yellow lights.  The stores and bars are bright.  I wonder what Milan might be.  I have been in the city only briefly—too briefly to judge, yet my quick sense is that this is not a city for me.  The city seems an image of images.  Its core is an advertising banner.  The images grab and flutter, but they don’t engage; we know them too well.  Our bus takes wide turns from one small street to another and passes to the broad, indistinct margin of the city with its lights of sales and blocks of repetition.

[We arrived in Milan on 7 March near the beginning of our travels and returned on 17 March as we prepared to leave Italy.]