by Giangiacomo Schiavi
A city in constant change, whose architecture moves with the times
Every now and then Milan strolls through memory and comes back with some nostalgia, when the Naviglio had not yet buried the city soul the cover of the concrete and the fog became poetry, with San Siro, that was a different Scala, mythical and untouchable. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to remember in the whirlwind of changes, to imagine what was yesterday and is no longer there, how to define the bottonuto or find the place once occupied by the Coperto dei Figini: one should recreate Paolo Valera read or take the Porta ruthlessly marginalized on the occasion of the anniversary, and make a flâneurically imprisoned journey, thinking back to Stendhal and Paul Klee, in love with the ideal city that anticipated Europe with the beauty of its buildings, the ingenuity and the goodness of its inhabitants, the belief in the future that emanates from its history. If you want, you can more conveniently browse Milan as it was, Milan as it is (Celip publishing house), a visual history of the city in motion, curated by Roberta Cordani, which tells of the municipality’s gradual metamorphosis from a small metropolis to an international capital. Wonderful, powerful, sweet, poignant images from the photo archives and from Milan’s museums, in order futurographic With captions and author’s texts, they tell of the change in Milan, “an indispensable dimension of its identity,” explains Claudio Salsi, superintendent of the Castello Sforzesco.
Old Milan reflected in the new defines a character and a bond that is not sterile regret but Respect for the signs of history: you can change without tearing down, sometimes it’s enough to patch, patch, break the isolation of the suburbs with urban planning. As for Italy The big problem in Milan is the wonderful beauty of its past: Where speculation wins, magic dies, but where creativity is combined with quality, there is nothing for everyone. For example, the current Piazzale Cadorna with Oldenburg’s “needle and thread” is certainly better than the anonymous one that Buffalo Bill gallops across on tour, and no comparison between Piazza Gae Aulenti and the towers of César Pelli and Cucinella, the Library of Trees and the “Vertical Forest” by Stefano Boeri and the ancient island of Randa and Fools. About the merry-go-rounds, about the black holes inherited from the 43 bombs, about the feeling of the unfinished that long lingered in Milan: Expo 2015 accelerated the changes underway, made Citylife a New York landscape, scattered here and there the signs of a new architecture, for forms and materials. Here is Milan, never standing still, never content. There is much to read and much to see in Celip’s valuable box, which contains a second volume about Milan bygone with over four hundred pictures from the 19th to the 1960s. But most of all there is a city to fall in love with, in constant transformation, that could emerge from the swampsthat makes it fertile and populated by people, a city that has resisted destruction, epidemics, wars, bombings and has always risen with courage and pride to become the dynamic capital of industrial development.
The attractiveness that today distinguishes it from other Italian cities is nothing but the result of the age-old fermentation that prevents it from standing still: it can be said that Milan in motion is a constant, yesterday and today. What must not be lost between nightlife, scooters and skyscrapers is the spirit, which an architect like Luca Beltrami shaped when, at the end of the 19th century, he saved the Sforzesco Castle from the attempt at real estate speculation: ideality, feelings, memory, environment were the coordinates that guided the reconstruction; Later, with the emotional investment in the “Pietà Rondanini”, an unfinished masterpiece by Michelangelo, administrative foresight was added. There is no need to reinvent a city, the spirit of Milan must be preserved.
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November 07, 2022 (Change November 07, 2022 | 10:27)
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