Milan Cityguide

As you fly into the capital of Lombardy over the Alps and the hills of the northern lakes, the picturesque landscape, suggests that one is about to arrive in a charming, lively and attractive Italian town. In fact, the city is one of the great industrial centers of Europe.

And by car it is a very different matter. From every direction crowded three- and four-lane motorways speed into the city. Every inch of the landscape is intensively cultivated. Colourful, ultramodern warehouses and enormous advertising hoarding line the roads up to a hundred kilometers from the city itself. The huge numbers of enormous Mercedes, BMWs and luxurious Alfa Romeos are another reminder that this is not the charming small town, small car Italy, one is about to arrive instead in a world of wealth, high-speed mobility, and ostentatious chic.

For the majority of Italians, Milan has a certain European exoticism about it, a character that is light years away from the rest of Italy's Mediterranean moods. Whether they like it or not, most Italians are bombarded, morning and evening, with updates on the progress of Mibtel, the Milan Stock Exchange index. They know that Milan is home to the publishers of most of the books and newspapers they read, as well as to the majority of the television stations they watch. They also know of the city as the birthplace of a new and aggressive entrepreneurial spirit, most famously represented by Silvio Berlusconi, whose fortune has surpassed that of the traditional giants of Italian capitalism in Turin-Fiat and Gianni Agneli. Launched in Milan, a city once known as the capital of morality, Italians have been keenly following the "Clean Hands" anti-corruption campaign, perhaps in response to the inevitable decline in moral standards that accompanied the new generation of entrepreneurs. They are also aware that the wealthy citizens of this sub-Alpine region, tired of subsidizing the Roman state and the less prosperous areas of Italy, where the first to demand a federalist-style independence. Although the majority of Italians remain unimpressed by the idea, they recognize that ambitious business persons who really want to test their prospects must introduce their products sooner or later at the Milan trade fairs. The city is the best place to do one's university studies, to find a jog, to try one's luck...

In Milan, foreign visitors immediately sense that they have arrived in a fast, exciting vital city. One only has to take a walk around Dome Square in the centre of the city. There is nothing tranquil, romantic, or peaceful here. Even the Duomo itself, one of the outstanding works of European architecture, radiates an entrepreneurial spirit, and an air of insatiable demand, with its myriad spires reaching upwards towards the sky. Dome Square is swarming not only with tourists, as elsewhere, it is thronged with well-dressed citizens going about their daily business. Chinese and Arab immigrants from "Chinatown" and the "Casbah", East European beggars, down-and-outs, Albanian dealers, drug addicts, and West European hobos. They represent the globalised society of a globalised world. What catches the exe in particular is not so much the contrast between the gleaming luxury of the new supermarkets on the one hand, and the permanent poverty on the other, but the chaotic complexity of this individualistic society.

Nevertheless, there is a distinct feeling that something new will emerge from all this. "I am who I am", said Giorgio Armani at the opening of his latest mega-store in downtown Milan, built in celebration of his twenty-five years as a fashion designer. "I am who I am" was doubtless the thought in the mind of the city's multimillionaire ex-entrepreneur mayor, who recently posed as a model, clad only in underpants, during a fashion show staged by an underwear firm. Giorgio Armani has already declared his intention to stage his next fashion show in the infamous Leoncavallo Social Centre, a location converted from former factory buildings, which provides a base for the alternative, left-wing youth of Milan in their revolt against the consumer society, and for marginalized Third World immigrants. Will the chic Via Monte Napoleone shake hands with Leoncavallo? We can only look on, bewildered. This, after all, is Milan.

AN OPERATIC CITY

As far back as the middle ages, the second-largest city in Italy after Rome boasted the name "la Grande" - "the Great". The city's greatness is at once strikingly apparent, one of Milan's most famous symbols is the 127-metre-tall Pirelli Building, a skyscraper which, because of its shape, is popularly referred to as "the Iron". Then, of course, there is La Scala. The classicist building not only boasts a magnificent exterior but also inside the acoustics are unparalleled.

Performaces of works by Rossini, Puccini, Toscani and Donizetti, as well as of masterpieces by Verdi, the one-hundredth anniversary of whose death has recently been celebrated, make La Scala one of the bastions of Italian art. The opera house was named after one of the members of the famous Visconti family, Count Regina della Scala.

Additional landmarks in Milan's colourful cultural life are the Teatro Piccolo, along with numerous small galleries and exhibition spaces, and the four great galleries-the Galleria dei Brera, the Ambrosina, the Poldi Pezzoli Museum, and the Castello Sforzesco. One could spend days strolling through these galleries, admiring the timeless creations of the great masters, pausing to stand in wonder before the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Bellini, Botticelli, Raphael, Titan or Tintoretto. By way of change, one might visit the Victor Emanuel Galleria, also known as the "Milan Salon". This giant glass dome, with its elegant shops and restaurants, is the main meeting point in the city. Under the cupola, at one particular point the coloured mosaic floor features the image of a bull. Here, visitors can observe a rather interesting custom, just by the bull's back is a ten-centimetre-deep hollow which passers-by step into and twirl around as this is supposed to bring you luck...

Further down the road visitors to the city can admire the works of the many pavement artists, or feed some of the thousands of pigeons. Last but not least, it is well worth boarding one of the yellow city trams (there is even a stop called "Hungary") and rattling one's way past the monumental battlements of the Sforzesca Palace and the giant cedars of the town park, before alighting at the Maria delle Grazie church, where one can damire one of the world's most famous paintings, Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper". After this uplifting sight you may bid the city farewell. Italian style, "Arrivederci Milano!".