Anatomy of a City

“Upon arriving in Milan, he went down to Piazzale Loreto and continued from there on foot across the city. Houses were in flames; there was smoke, dust, soldiers, […]. With no small effort, Vezzari finally arrived on his home turf. He had lost virtually all his bearings. With the buildings gutted and in ruins, the landscape had changed face. But he saw it in an instant; over there was his house. It was still standing. All around were mountains of rubble, the butts of what were structural walls. The houses all around him had collapsed, the houses of his friends […] The friends he would go visit in the evening, or who would come visit him, just a few minutes away, across the square that had now become a field of wreckage, or down the road that wasn’t there anymore. His house was left standing, but without saying as much, he could feel it had fallen with the others, because our home is also made of other homes, and though the walls materially had not been hit, the hearth had been lacerated.”[1]

The year 1943 was an annus horribilis for Milan. The bombing of the city devastated the historic centre. With almost 60 percent of its heritage swept away, the deep wound left would change the face of the city forever. Only Dresden would suffer a worse fate.

Palazzo Marino, Piazza San Fedele, Filarete’s General Hospital (today’s Ca’ Granda, site of the University of Milan), the Galleria, La Scala theatre, Palazzo Reale, Piazza Fontana, St Ambrose’s Basilica, Our Lady of Graces… all the most heartfelt monuments identifying the city were scarred profoundly. Even the fairgrounds paid their toll, with over 70 percent of the pavilions destroyed.

[1] Giorgio SCERBANENCO, “La casa in piedi” [The house still standing], Corriere della Sera, August 27th, 1943.

Milan was down, but it was not out. It sense of resilience and perseverance resounds proudly in the words of the city’s first mayor after its liberation, Antonio Greppi: “Much has been destroyed, but we will patiently and confidently reconstruct it all.”

Reconstruction became a moral imperative. Houses, buildings, factories, and cultural venues were all invested by the renewal process. On September 12th, the Milan Fair opened its doors. In the words of Enrico De Nicola, Italy’s provisional head of state, “By opening this fair, after having suffered so greatly, Milan has taken the lead in the economic recovery of the nation. This is, today, its greatest source of pride.”

The intense reconstruction effort radically changed the city. The factories in the area around Central Station were demolished and relocated, while the rubble was cleared out of the urban area, sent north-east to today’s Lambro Park, and north-west to what would become Monte Stella, a striking example of land art and a monument to the post-war turnaround.

The changing face of those years can also be seen through another medium, when the city became the backdrop for a number of neorealist films. The pictures capture many of the signs of change, forming an archive of urban memory.

February 8th, 1951 marked the release on cinema screens of Miracle in Milan. An urban fairytale, the picture speaks of the poor and underprivileged, of a city rent by economic inequality and injustice, of age-old trades and derelict neighbourhoods, where the dispossessed by the war, however, ultimately find redemption in a magical ending.

Filmed on location from February to June 1950, the images document the deep wounds of the city, but they also enable the modern history of Milan to be reconstructed by capturing its transformations.
Thus, in the shantytown of Brambi, where the lead character Totò lives, we see Via Valvassori Peroni as it was, surrounded by wasteland where kids played ball; the funeral procession for the character Lolotta winds its way down Via Melchiorre Gioia, Viale Certosa, and across Piazza della Repubblica; whereas a Piazza Duomo adorned with neon signs provides the magnificent backdrop for the final scene, when the street sweepers take flight over the city—a scene that left its mark on no less than Stephen Spielberg, who years later found inspiration in it for ET on his bicycle across the night sky.

In the folds of time we catch a glimpse of the changes to come; in the photographs, the reality, a bare prelude to our day and age. Above all, however, we see demolitions, departures, arrivals, and new roots.
It was an Italy on the move and mirrored in Milan. A city gearing up to usher in the long-awaited economic boom, with all its contradictions, as new buildings and towers (the Velasca and Pirelli towers, in particular) defied the skies and with their shadows sought to consign poverty to the past. Milan was full of plans, experiments, and dreams, opening its doors to a growing population attracted by the prospects of work and pitting massive and enduring public housing projects against the spread of unauthorized developments and urban sprawl.

Milan thus became a huge construction site, driving expansion into the outskirts—a less magical, but more practical solution.
In the collective imagination and in factories, black and white images show scaffolding, fencing, and the shells of buildings everywhere. And growing armies of tradesmen—bricklayers, tinsmiths, electricians.
It was hardly a workers’ paradise; more a promising purgatory in which the idea of the future appears almost a faith, underpinned by hard work.
Until everything changed again, at the end of the 1960s.

There is a place where the story of this changing city finds a true wealth of details and perspectives—the Fondazione Fiera Milano Historical Archive. One of those perspectives is given by views of the city portraying hard-working Milanese people busy in occupations that have disappeared, the vertical skeletons of skyscrapers, and outlines of an urban development without plan or pause. Here we look at some of the old trades of those bygone years, against the backdrop of a social fabric woven with old customs and emerging new habits. Though they have vanished from our lives, their memory remains in the parlance of Milan’s people.

To begin with, there was the grinder—moletta—who sharpened and repaired knives, scissors, and razors on his rounds through the streets, pushing a cart with a pedal-operated grindstone. Trailing him were “stringed” chestnut sellers—fironatt, not to be confused with the maronatt, who sold their chestnuts roasted.
Doing the rounds were also lamplighters, tasked with lighting and dimming the city’s oil and gas lamps (lampionnée), while on rooftops, sweeps cleared away soot and sediment from chimneys. Elsewhere, washerwomen were a regular sight on the Navigli canals, kneeling on their wooden brellin as they scrubbed linen clean on stone washboards, as were tanners, whose work polluted the Vetra canal and damaged their own health, in an age when occupational health and safety was still a thing of the future.

Others who plied their trade on the streets included tinsmiths—magnan—who resurfaced copper pots and pans, while umbrella repair men with their toolboxes did the rounds on their bicycles, fixing umbrella handles, ribs, and canopies. A common sight around Piazza Duomo were cadregatt mending the rush seats of chair, along with tram drivers—manetta, and conductors—travier.

Street sellers and merchants abounded, selling anything and everything. Baker boys—prestinèe—did the rounds on foot or by bicycle selling bread and flour. Ice was instead sold by giasee in one-metre blocks weighing almost 25 kilos off the back of a wooden cart, while sciostree sold coal from warehouses along the canals and polentatt sold polenta on the old Corsia dei Servi.

Trades and crafts could be found clustered throughout the city, shaping how areas and neighbourhoods were known. Between the Naviglio Pavese canal and Corso San Gottardo, cheese sellers gave rise to the “borgo dei furmagiatt,” whereas the “borgo degli scigulatt”—onion-sellers and, by extension, greengrocers—was in the Sarpi district. The armorari, who crafted cold weapons, instead gravitated around Pizza Mercanti and Piazza Verziere, along with many others.

The memory of these old trades is still preserved in many landmarks across Milan, such as the Madonna dei Tencitt (charcoal burners), and in literature, in celebrated characters such as the baker boy in Manzoni’s The Betrothed.

For all the others—barbers, cobblers, apothecaries (today’s pharmacists), butchers, grocers and greengrocers, milkmen, and the list goes on—the city has been a home and backdrop to their gradual transformation into today’s occupations. Yet some have resisted, or are making a comeback, in defiance of the standardization that mass production has imposed on everything, and not just prices.