by Bill Bryson
I walked the couple of miles to the American Express office – I was now out of money – wondering if I would be lectured like a schoolboy who has lost his lunch money. There were seven or eight people, all Americans, in the single queue and it became evident as we chatted together that we had all had our pockets picked by children of roughly the same description, though at different places in the city. And this of course was just the American Express cheques. If you added in all the Visa and other kinds of traveller’s cheques that were taken, and all the cash, then it was obvious that the gypsies must clear at a minimum $25,000-$30,000 every Sunday afternoon. Presumably the cheques are then laundered through friendly exchange bureaux around the country. Why do the police care so little about this racket (unless of course they get a cut)? At all events, American Express replaced my cheques with commendable dispatch, and I was back on the street fifteen minutes later.
Outside a gypsy woman with a three-year-old on her lap asked me for money. ‘I gave already,’ I said, and walked on to the station.
16. Milan and Como
I arrived in Milan in mid-afternoon, expecting great things. It is after all the richest city in Italy, the headquarters of many of the most famous names of Italian commerce: Campari, Benetton, Armani, Alfa-Romeo, the Memphis design group, and the disparate empires of Silvio Berlusconi and Franco Maria Ricci. But this, as I should have realized beforehand, is its problem. Cities that are dedicated to making money, and in Milan they appear to think about little else, seldom have much energy left for charm.
I got a room in an expensive but nondescript hotel across from the monumental white marble central railway station – like something built for Mussolini to give a strutting address to massed crowds – and embarked on a long, hot walk into town along the Via Pisani. This was a broad, modern boulevard, more American than European. It was lined with sleek glass and chrome office buildings, but the central grass strip was scrubby and uncared-for and the few benches where you could rest had syringes scattered beneath them. As I moved further into the city the buildings became older and rather more pleasing, but there was still something lacking. I paused to consult my map in a tiny park on a pleasant residential street near the cathedral square and it was depressingly squalid – grassless and muddy, with broken benches, and pigeons picking among hundreds of cigarette butts and disused tram tickets. I find that hard to excuse in a rich city.
Two blocks on and Milan blossomed. Clustered together were the city’s three glories: La Scala, the Duomo and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. I went first to the cathedral – cavernous and Gothic, the third-largest church in the world – begrimed on the outside and covered in scaffolding, and so gloomy within that it took me whole minutes to find the ceiling. It was quite splendid in a murky sort of way and entirely free of tourists, which was a happy novelty after Florence. Here it was just a constant stream of locals popping in to add a candle to the hundreds already burning and say a quick ‘Ave Maria’ before heading home for supper. I liked that. It is such an unusual sight to find a grand church being used for its intended purpose.
Afterwards I crossed the cathedral square to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele and spent a happy hour wandering through it, hands behind my back, browsing in the windows and noting with unease the occasional splats from the pigeons that had managed to sneak in and were now leading a rewarding life gliding among the rafters and shitting on the people below. It is an imposing shopping arcade, four storeys high, built in the grandiose style of the 1860s and still probably the most handsome shopping mall in the world, with floors of neatly patterned tiles, a vaulted latticework roof of glass and steel, and a cupola rising 160 feet above a rotunda where the two interior avenues intersect. It has the loftiness and echoing hush, and even the shape, of a cathedral, but with something of the commercial grandness of a nineteenth-century railway station thrown in. Every shopping centre should be like this.
Needing my afternoon infusion of caffeine, I took a table outside one of the three or four rather elegant cafés scattered among the shops. It was one of those typically European places where they have seventy tables and one hopelessly overworked waiter, who dashes around trying to deliver orders, clear tables and take money all at the same time, and who has the cheerful, nothing’s-too-much-trouble attitude that you would expect of someone in such an interesting and remunerative line of work. You don’t get a second chance in these places. I was staring at nothing in particular, chin in hand, idly wondering if Ornella Muti had ever done any mud wrestling, when it filtered through to my consciousness that the waiter was making one of his rare visits to my vicinity and had actually said to me, ‘Prego?’
I looked up. ‘Oh, an espres—’ I said, but he was gone already and I realized that I was never going to get this close to him again unless I married his sister. So with a sigh of resignation I pulled myself up, moved sideways through the tiny gaps between the tables, grimacing apologetically as I caused a succession of unforgiving people to slop their coffee or plunge their noses into their gateaux, and returned unrefreshed to the streets.
I strolled along the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, a wide pedestrian shopping street, looking for an alternative café and finding none. For a moment I thought I had died and been sent by mistake to yuppie heaven. Unlike the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, where at least there were a couple of bookshops and an art gallery or two, here and on the neighbouring streets there was nothing to sustain the mind or soul, just boutiques selling expensive adornments for the body: shoes, handbags, leather goods, jewellery, designer clothing that hung on the body like sacking and cost a fortune. Things reached a kind of understated intensity on the Via Montenapoleone, an anonymous-looking side street but none the less the most exclusive shopping artery in the country, and lined with ritzy stores where the password was clearly ‘Money’s no object’. Apart from the old shopping arcade, Milan appeared to have no café life at all. There were a few establishments, but they were all hole-in-the-wall stand-up places, where people would order a small coffee, toss it back and return to the street all in five seconds. That wasn’t what I was looking for.
After southern Italy, Milan seemed hardly Italian at all. People walked quickly and purposefully, swinging shopping bags with names like Gucci and Ferragamo on them. They didn’t dawdle over espressos and tuck into mountainous plates of pasta, napkins bibbed into their collars. They didn’t engage in passionate arguments about trivialities. They took meetings. They made deals. They talked into car phones. They drove with restraint, mostly in BMWs and Porsches, and parked neatly. They all looked as if they had just stepped off the covers of Vogue or GQ. It was like an outpost of southern California in Italy. I don’t know about you, but I find southern California hard enough to take in southern California. This was Italy – I wanted pandemonium and street life, people in sleeveless vests on front stoops, washing hanging across the streets, guys selling things from pushcarts, Ornella Muti and Giancarlo Giannini zipping past on a Vespa. Most of all, I wanted a cup of coffee.
In the morning I went to the Brera Gallery, hidden away on a back street and reached through a courtyard in a scaffolding-covered palazzo. Big things were going on here: plaster dust hung in the air and there was a commotion of hammering and drilling. The gallery seemed to be only half open. Several of the rooms were closed off and even in the open rooms there were lots of rectangles of unfaded wallpaper where pictures had been lent out or sent away for restoration. But what remained was not only sensational but familiar – Mantegna’s foreshortened body of Christ, a Bellini madonna, two Canalettos recently and glowingly restored, and Piero della Francesca’s gorgeously rich but decidedly bizarre ‘Madonna with Christ Child, Angels, Saints and Federico da Montefeltro’ – our old friend the Duke of Urbino again.
I didn’t understand this picture at all. If it was painted after the Duke died and here he was now in heaven, why was Christ a baby again? On the other hand, were we to take it that the Duke had somehow managed to fly through the centuries in order
to be present at Christ’s birth? Whatever the meaning, it was a nifty piece of work. One man liked it so much that he had brought his own folding chair and was just sitting there with arms crossed looking at it. The best thing about the Brera was that there was hardly anyone there, just a few locals and no foreign tourists but me. After Florence, it was bliss to be able to see the paintings without having to ask somebody to lift me up.
Afterwards I walked a long way across the city to see Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper’ in the refectory beside the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. You pay a load of money at a ticket window and step into a bare, dim hall and there it is, this most famous of frescoes, covering the whole of the far wall. A railing keeps you from approaching any closer than about twenty-five feet, which seems unfair since it is so faint that you could barely see it from five feet and must strain to the utmost to see anything at all from twenty-five feet. It’s like a ghost image. If you hadn’t seen it reproduced a thousand times before, you probably wouldn’t be able to recognize it at all. One end was covered with scaffolding and a great deal of gleaming Dr Who-like restoration equipment. A lone technician was on a platform scratching away. They have been working on the ‘Last Supper’ for years, but I couldn’t see any sign that the thing was actually coming to life.
Poor old Leonardo hasn’t been too well served by history. The wall began to crumble almost immediately (some of it had been built with loose dirt) after he finished painting it, and some early friars cut a door into it, knocking off Christ’s feet. Then over time the chamber stopped being a refectory and became in turn a stable (can you imagine that – a roomful of donkeys with the greatest painting in history on the wall?), a storage-room, a prison and a barracks. Much of the earlier restoration work was not, to put it charitably, terribly accomplished. One artist gave Saint James six fingers. It is a wonder that it survived at all. In point of fact, it hasn’t really. I don’t know what it will be like after another ten or fifteen years of restoration work, but for now it would be more accurate to say that this is where the ‘Last Supper’ used to be.
I slotted 1,000 lire into a machine on the wall, knowing that it would be a mistake, and was treated to a brief and ponderous commentary about the history of the fresco related by a woman on Mogadon whose command of English pronunciation was not altogether up to the task (‘Da fresk you see in fronna you iss juan of da grettest works of art in da whole worl ...’), then looked around for any other ways to waste my money and, finding none, stepped blinking out into the strong sunshine.
I strolled over to the nearby Museo Tecnica, where I paid another small fortune to walk through its empty halls. I was curious to see it because I had read that it had working models of all Leonardo’s inventions. It did – small wooden ones – but they were surprisingly dull and, well, wooden, and for the rest the museum was just full of old typewriters and oddments of machinery that meant nothing to me because the labels were in Italian. And anyway, let’s be frank, the Italians’ technological contribution to humankind stopped with the pizza oven.
I took a late-afternoon train to Como for no other reason than that it was nearby and on a lake and I didn’t wish to spend another night in a city. I remembered reading that Lake Como was where Mussolini was found hiding out after Italy fell, and I figured it must have something going for it if it was the last refuge of a desperate man.
It did. It was a lovely little city, clean and perfect, in a cupped hand of Alpine mountains at the southern end of the narrow, thirty-mile-long lake of the same name. It is only a small place, but it boasts two cathedrals, two railway stations (each with its own line to Milan), two grand villas, a fetching park, a lakeside promenade overhung with poplars and generously adorned with green wooden benches, and a maze of ancient pedestrian-only streets filled with little shops and secret squares. It was perfect, perfect.
I found a room in the Hotel Plinius in the heart of town, had two coffees at a café on the Piazza Roma overlooking the lake, ate a splendid meal in a friendly restaurant on a back street and fell in love with Italy all over again. Afterwards I spent a long, contented evening just walking, shuffling with hands in pockets along the apparently endless lakeside promenade and lolling for long periods watching evening sneak in. I walked as far as the Villa Geno, on a promontory at a bend in the lake, and strolled back round to the opposite bank to the small lakeside park with its museum, built in the likeness of a temple, in commemoration of Allesandro Volta, who lived in Como from 1745 to 1827, and there I lolled some more. I walked back to the hotel through empty streets, browsing in shop windows, and thinking how very lucky the Italians are not to have Boots and Dixons and Rumbelows filling their shopping streets with tat and glare, and retired to bed a happy man.
In the morning I visited the two main churches. The Basilica of San Fidele, begun in 914, was much the more ancient, but the domed cathedral, 500 years younger, was larger and more splendid – indeed, more splendid than any provincial church I had seen since Aachen. It was dark and I had to stand for a minute to adjust to the dimness for fear of walking into a pillar. Morning sunlight flowed through a lofty stained-glass window, but was swallowed almost immediately by the gloom among the high arches. The church was not only surprisingly large for its community, but richly endowed – it was full of subtle tapestries and ancient paintings and some striking statuary, including a Christ figure that is said to weep. (They must show it a Jimmy Tarbuck video beforehand.) I spent an hour sitting out of the way, gazing at the interior and watching people lighting candles. Very restful. This done, I felt content to return to the station and climb aboard the first train to Switzerland.
The train went north, through steep and agreeable countryside, but without the lake views I had been hoping for. We left the country at Chiasso, at the southernmost tip of a pointed length of Switzerland that plunges into Italy like a diver into water. Chiasso looked an unassuming border town, but it was the setting of one of Europe’s greatest bank frauds, when in 1979 five men at the small local branch of Credit Suisse managed to syphon off the better part of $1 billion before anyone back at head office in Zurich noticed this slight drain on the bank’s liquidity.
Switzerland and Italy are threaded together like the fingers of clasped hands all along the southern Alps and I spent much of the day passing from one to the other, as I headed for Brig. The train climbed sluggishly through ever-higher altitudes to Lugano and thence Locarno.
At Locarno I had to change trains and had an hour to kill, so I went for a look around the town and a sandwich. It was an immaculate, sunny place, with a lakeside walk even finer than Como’s. They still spoke Italian here, but you could tell you were in Switzerland just from the zebra crossings and the glossy red benches, which all looked as if they had been painted that morning, and the absence of even a leaf on the paths of the little lakeside park. Street sweepers were at work everywhere, sweeping up leaves with old-fashioned brooms, and I had the distinct feeling that if I dropped a chewing-gum wrapper someone in uniform would immediately step out from behind a tree and sweep it up or shoot me, or possibly both.
They don’t seem to eat sandwiches in Locarno. I walked all around the business district and had trouble finding even a bakery. When at last I did find one it seemed to sell nothing but gooey pastries, though they did have a pile of what I took to be sausage rolls. Starving, I ordered three, at considerable expense, and went outside with them. But they turned out to contain mashed figs – a foodstuff that only your grandmother would eat, and only then because she couldn’t find her dentures – and tasted like tea leaves soaked in cough syrup. I gamely nibbled away at one of them, but it was too awful and I put them in my rucksack with the idea that I might try them again later. In the event I forgot all about them and didn’t rediscover them until two days later when I pulled my last clean shirt from the rucksack and found the rolls clinging to it.
I went into the station buffet for a glass of mineral water to wash away the stickiness. It was possibly the unfriendliest place i
n Switzerland. It had eight customers but was so quiet you could hear the clock ticking. The waiter stood at the counter lazily reaming beer glasses with a cloth. He made no move to serve me until I held up a finger and called for a mineral water. He brought a bottle and a glass, wordlessly placed them on the table and returned to his cloth and wet glasses. He looked as if he had just learned that his wife had run off with the milkman and taken all his Waylon Jennings albums, but then I noticed that the other customers were wearing the same sour expression. It seemed chilling after the boundless good humour of Italy. Across from me sat an old lady with a metal crutch, which clattered to the floor as she tried to get up. The waiter just stood there watching, clearly thinking, Now what are you going to do, you old cripple? I sprang to her aid and for my pains was given a withering look and the teensiest of ‘Grazie’s’, then she got up and hobbled out.
Locarno, I decided, was a strange place. I bought a ticket on the two o’clock train to Domodossala, a name that can be pronounced in any of thirty-seven ways. The man in the ticket window made me try out all of them, furrowing his brow gravely as if he couldn’t for the life of him think what nearby community had a name that might cause an American difficulty, until finally I stumbled on the approximate pronunciation. ‘Ah, Domodossala!’ he said, pronouncing it a thirty-eighth way. As a final act of kindness he neglected to tell me that because of work on the railway lines the service was by bus for the first ten kilometres.