There’s more to Milan than meets the eye. Step away from finance, fashion and football to explore the city’s hidden gems.
See another, softer side to the city, with art, food and history, suggests Chris Leadbeater
For the briefest moment, Luigi Marzotto shoots me a glance hinting that I have uttered a blasphemy most foul. He is probably correct. Because I have just expressed the thought, tongue running ahead of brain, that La Scala – Milan’s temple of opera, where titans of the genre have performed since 1778 – might be, well, perhaps, just a little ugly. Having issued my scandalous statement, I stand back to consider its merits. For there is also a chance that I am right. My first impression of the building is of a flinty blockiness as it occupies the north–west corner of Piazza della Scala; a hardness of angle to the way its entrance juts to the very edge of the thoroughfare.
Finally, Luigi speaks – his reply trapped somewhere between politeness and shock. ‘Well, of course, the acoustics inside are incredible,’ he says. ‘And if you come here in December, as the season is starting, and the square is illuminated, full of people...’ He trails off as if he still can’t quite believe what I’ve said. Behind us, I’m sure the statue of Leonardo da Vinci scowls at me.
Maybe it is because I have just outed myself as a philistine, but there is an extra pace to Luigi’s stride as, shortly after, he ushers me into the Chiostro delle Umiliate – as if saying ‘you want to question beauty? I’ll give you beauty’. He is as good as his unspoken word. Pinned silently to Via Cappuccio, this former convent could easily be frozen in the 15th century. Its four–sided cloister encloses a grassy square where an antique well haunts the centre. A tortoise plods along a wall, its ochre shell impervious to the afternoon rays.
I might almost expect one of the nuns who contemplated eternity in this garden to pass me on the brick–paved walkway – were it not for the clues that this is now a cluster of 15 apartments: two plastic toddlers’ tricycles, recently discarded; a ground–floor window giving on to a study adorned with pictures of vintage Bugatti cars; the linen shades hanging from the roof on the east side of the complex, batting away the
sunlight. Luigi throws me another glance – decipherable as ‘Happy now?’. I am.
This is what I have been seeking – a shard of subtlety in a place rarely hailed for restraint. My long–held conviction is that Milan is a preening peacock, defined by its ‘Three Fs’. Finance, certainly, finds its groove here – notably on Piazza degli Affari, where the Borsa Italiana is Italy’s stock exchange. Fashion is an inalienable part of the Lombardy capital’s mystique – Prada, Versace and Armani all have their headquarters in a conurbation that is never knowingly underdressed, and the annual Milan Fashion Week, which wrapped up late last month, is a globally renowned event. Football is a religion in a city with two of the planet’s top clubs – Internazionale and AC Milan share the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza (the ‘San Siro’) on the north–west side of town. Each has been the European champion in the past 11 years – and the latter can claim extra bravado points as former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi owned it for much of the past three decades. Big, bright, brash, a northern powerhouse in expensive shoes, Milan can never be accused of hiding its light.
Yet here is Luigi, trying to show me the very corners where the city reins in its swagger for something softer – leading a regular Milan’s Secret Gardens tour offered by the Baglioni Hotel Carlton. This five–star retreat manages to be an emblem of tact in a world of glamour. Its reception gazes forwards on to busy Via Senato – but a rear door grants quiet access to the elegant promenade of Via della Spiga behind, where boutiques gleam with the latest chic outfits. Marzotto’s three–hour walking route is designed to display a flip side to such largesse – and does so again three doors down from the Chiostro delle Umiliate, where the Casa Radice Fossati reaches further into the past, to the 13th century. Luigi raps on this Romanesque (but now residential) palace’s unmarked doors – and, to the sound of a bolt being drawn back, the concierge’s face emerging – takes me to another private space, of sun–dappled lawn, whispering sycamore trees and lilac hortensia shrubs.
This is one of the tour’s most appealing factors – that it provides access to locations that are difficult for the public to enter unassisted. Other stops on the itinerary are more open to visitors – and yet little better appreciated. San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore is such an entity, a 16th–century church on Corso Magenta that accrues few surges of interest in a city where the Duomo is Italy’s largest cathedral.
But Luigi takes a sharp turn up its unremarkable steps, into a temple that is divided into two compartments. The second was a sealed chamber when the structure was part of a Benedictine convent. ‘The nuns were forbidden to cross the partition,’ he says. ‘But they had the company of this .... ’ He flicks a hand towards a 16th–century fresco of The Last Supper, painted by Aurelio and Giovan Pietro Luini, sons of Leonardo acolyte Bernardino Luini – one of many wonders in a room where artworks outnumber admirers.
Leonardo holds perpetual centre–stage half a mile to the west along Corso Magenta, where the most eulogised The Last Supper, preserved in an air–lock, foments queues outside Santa Maria delle Grazie. Few, though, peer behind the church, at its lovely courtyard garden, where magnolia trees flutter within touching distance of genius. We pause here for five tranquil minutes, before we wander across the road, and into the arms of the Renaissance.
It would be impossible to describe La Vigna di Leonardo as ‘hidden’. It was inaugurated as a temporary museum when Milan hosted the Expo 2015 world’s fair, and has been kept alive because of its popularity. And yet it speaks of a city removed from catwalks, corner flags and cash–jingle, no matter how loosely it is tied to its subject. The tale runs that this was the site of a vineyard given to Leonardo in 1499 by the Duchy of Milan, to encourage him to stay in the city. After five centuries of invasions, fires, building collapses and world wars, the vines have been replanted using the malvasia di candia aromatica variety supposedly tended by the great man.
But while the project’s exact authenticity is debatable, its prettiness is not. The grapes swell in the garden of the Casa degli Atellani – a 15th–century mansion restored with care, and still inhabited. The effect is glorious in its incongruity, bicycles and scooters parked outside ornate delights like the Zodiac Hall, where astrological figures – scuttling scorpions, gambolling rams – cavort on the ceiling via brushstroke. To amble on the lawn is to be in a Milan where Berlusconi never uttered a sound bite, where Gianni Versace never stitched, where Marco van Basten never scored.
With this comes the realisation that for every unmistakable landmark – the Duomo; the Sforza Castle; the marbled retail shrine of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II – there is a concealed gem. There is LuBar, an evening watering hole slotted into the forecourt of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, all citrus–fragrant aperitivos and al fresco tables. There is San Bernardino alle Ossa, an 18th–century church, close to the cathedral, whose walls are lined with skulls, ribs and femurs – as overspill from the cemetery that once lay next door. Even the Duomo is not above a moment of surprise, secreting a replica of the famous gold Madonnina statue that graces its spire in an alcove beyond the high altar, visible only to those who wander fully within.
But the main dissembler is the Fondazione Prada – which, despite its name, all but denies that it has any association with fashion. An arty institution, established by the sartorial giant in 1995, with a focus on architecture and modern multimedia, it took over its latest premises – a distillery that first steamed and smoked in 1910 – three years ago. It is a deliberately shape– shifting proposition. Not only does it hold itself adrift of the core of town – loitering, literally, on the wrong side of the tracks, directly south of the rail stockyards of scruffy Largo Isarco – it makes no mention of couture, haute or otherwise. It fills its corridors with a swirl of ethereal content. Rotating exhibitions cover matters as diverse as the Italian feminist struggle in the 70s, and domestic terrorism in the same decade. It crowns this captivating cornucopia with the ‘Haunted House’, one of the distillery’s original structures, now daubed in a coat of gold leaf, where esoteric sculptures by the US artist Robert Gober are stationed without any explanation, their meaning yours to unravel.
As you leave the Haunted House, you are funnelled out into Bar Luce – a lunchtime hotspot, designed, remarkably, by the American film director Wes Anderson, and set up as a Milanese take on a Midwest diner some time in the late 50s. Suddenly there are families milling, children demanding ice cream, waiters dashing, coffee machines whirring, pinball machines ringing, a jukebox playing tunes from a sepia Italy – 7-in slivers by jazz trumpeter Nini Rosso, by composer Ennio Morricone, by showman Johnny Dorelli. I order a latte, and a panini overloaded with juicy pink tuna, and tell myself that long–held convictions make such a fine noise when they are shattered.
La Vigna di Leonardo, a museum, speaks of a city removed from catwalks, corner flags and cash–jingle