Serving time in Milan
It’s Italy’s city of fashion and football (and felons). So for a very different night out on the town read on...
WE are close to the destination, at the border of the city,’ our driver announces as the car trundles across tram tracks on the edges of Milan.
It is now slightly calmer than earlier in the day when raindrops the size of golf balls fell from the sky. Off in the distance, the edges of the clouds are clearly defined, as they are backlit by bolts of lightning. The weather reminds me of the scene in The Shawshank Redemption when Tim Robbins’ character Andy Dufresne escapes from prison. We, though, are on our way into jail. Bollate penitentiary to be precise.
As the car comes to a halt, I am suddenly nervous about what lies ahead. Will my dignity be laid bare as some burly guard searches me? What about the prisoners too?
The silence is broken once again as our driver tells us ‘You don’t look like the type’ destined for Bollate. I turn to my partner – in life, not crime that is – and smile as we reveal the point of our visit.
When we get to the entrance, our driver asks a guard if we are in the right place. We step out of the car and into an office by the prison gate. Our dignity intact, a man dressed at odds with his surroundings guides a group of us on a short walk across the courtyard to InGalera, slang for ‘in jail’ (derived from the galera, or oared boats, once powered by prisoners).
As the metal door creaks open and we enter, suddenly our ‘waiter’ doesn’t look so out of place.
Once seated, it is easy to forget the uniqueness of the place and think you are in a restaurant like any other. Except it is not. Our waiter is not just a criminal; he is a prisoner of Bollate.
The movie posters that hang on the walls lighten the mood a little. Each one dedicated to a film set in a jail. You can even spy one of Shawshank in the corner.
AS we are seated and handed a couple of menus, with my little bit of Spanish (which is close to Italian) I try to decipher what it is saying. My partner has other ideas as he requests a menu in English. But to no avail – they have none. Our waiter now looks slightly nervous and unsure what to do. He turns to Massimo Sestito, the maître d’ – one of the few hires made from outside of the prison walls.
While the waiter has just given an unpolished performance, the guidance Sestito offers is a demonstration of the prison’s programme in action. That is, giving the inmates the experience and tools to equip them for a job on the outside. The inmates who work here are serving eight to ten years – to ensure they get the level of experience they need.
As our server proceeds to explain each of the dishes, telling a few anecdotes along the way, he eases up. My nervousness is subsiding too and we develop a rapport. The experience is apparently not uncommon as the restaurant’s manager, Silvia Polleri, is on record as saying: ‘People leave with an understanding that we don’t have three-headed men here.’ Ah, slowly the working of the scheme unfolds.
With our thorough explanation of the menu through, we order salmon Carpaccio flavoured with gin and tonic and tomato soup.
Working her way from the kitchen at the far side of the room, I spot a lady talking to the group of men in their early 40s at one table before moving on to what I presume is two couples at the next. It is Silvia Polleri herself, the manager and founder of the restaurant. She apologises for having to greet us using her left hand. ‘I had a fall,’ she says, explaining her bandaged right arm. As we talk, she encourages me to continue eating my soup – a dish ‘once common among the poor, as tomatoes were cheap and plentiful’, as my waiter had just explained.
It’s nice to know they weren’t denied all the good things in life. I was tempted to lick the bowl.
‘Do you know this story?’ she says pointing to the message scrawled in what I presume is a concoction of balsamic vinegar on the side of my bowl. It’s not as we had just joked some sort of cry for help from the kitchen. Silvia then gives us a verse of the pop song Viva La Pappa Col Pomodoro (Long Live The Food and The Tomato) to which the writing refers. She thanks me for my applause before telling us more about how the restaurant and prison work.
Silvia’s warm grandmotherly-like demeanour belies the savvy operator who clearly has a deep understanding of the catering trade and who was asked three years ago to set up InGalera. Ms Polleri has been running the prison’s catering business for years before ‘pampering the Milanese middleclass’ when she owned her own catering business.
Silvia talks about the kind of work ethic the prison’s programme can instill: ‘a waiter or a cook has inescapable rules in his work chain. Very often in jail people don’t have any work culture at all’.
Of course, not everyone will want to work in a restaurant. There are other programmes such as gardening and sowing.
A break in proceedings allows me to reflect on the clientele. A family of two youngsters and another couple are at one large table under the watchful eye of Clint Eastwood trying to Escape from Alcatraz. At the following table is a young couple in their early 20s on a date.
Sipping on my Five Roses rosé wine, the impressiveness of the scheme which I had initially thought a mere novelty dawns on me. I
share my thoughts with my partner. ‘I’d have loved to have been searched, it would have added to the experience,’ he says half-joking.
We both agree that simply locking people up and ostracising them entirely from society and expect them to return fully reformed doesn’t seem like the wisest ideas.
‘We get to go out the gate,’ I say. ‘The waiters and staff have to return to their cells.’
Our next course arrives. I have opted for a selection of cheeses with sauces and melon balls infused with mustard. I am warned that it is quite strong. It reminds me of wasabi. Thankfully, due to the warning, I managed to avoid the embarrassment I experienced the first time trying sushi years ago.
The melon delivers delicious refreshment at the same time. Meanwhile, my accomplice for the evening has ordered Crayfish Guazzetto, with which he needs a little help on how to eat it. The waiter duly obliges with news from the kitchen. He demonstrates... you break it and suck out the meat.
IT is strange how we are bonded with our waiter, perhaps more so than with any waiter in any other restaurant I have visited. Even more unusually, the chef came out to shake my hand when I passed on my compliments.
As the night winds down, others seem visibly more relaxed too and the two kids are being lightly scolded by their parents for running about.
Before ending our night with a Creme caramel and Millefoglei D’Amaretto (a dish with layers of Amaretto biscuit and mascarpone cream and red berries), we digest it all with espressos.
On paying the bill, our waiter, whose hands are full clearing our dishes, asks us to wait a minute before returning and shaking us by the hand and thanking us. Silvia drops by too and says she hopes we will return some day. Quite the send-off. Then we make our own Great Escape. Albeit a slightly expensive one. The taxi from and to the city costs us €40 each way.
The drive back to the apartment where we are staying offers the chance for further reflection.
Suddenly a pang of guilt. After all, our waiter was possibly responsible for someone’s death. Could Bollate’s champions just be a bunch of bleeding heart liberals? What would the poor victims’ family think? According to Silvia though: ‘20% of prisoners who have served time in Bollate go on to reoffend in comparison to 67% at other prisons.’ The time spent locked up can give prisoners a chance to reflect on what they have done wrong. The irony of course is that I had my own chance to reflect on crime and punishment in prison.