Henry James went into ecstasies when he first saw Venice, when he peered up at the Duomo in Florence, when he gazed out on the Bay of Naples. The beauty overwhelmed him. He was the American author who taught a whole country “the luxury of loving Italy.” Still, there was one city this Italophile had no time for.
“In its general aspect still lingers a northern reserve,” the young James sniffed in 1869 when he reached Milan. He walked through the Duomo and was only moderately impressed. He looked at Leonardo’s Last Supper and called it the “saddest work of art in the world.” And then, like too many Americans after him, he bailed for Lake Como. He was not about to hang around a city he called, with Jamesian understatement, “rather perhaps the last of the prose capitals than the first of the poetic.”
Your loss, Enrico. Milan has no river or seafront. It often rains. It is short on romance.
Its hectic pace does not reward visitors seeking dolce far niente. And these days it’s my favorite city on earth. Austere masterpiece, standoffish bijou, Milan has emerged in the four years since the outbreak of the pandemic, which hit northern Italy early and brutally, as the most culturally dynamic big city in Europe, one teeming with youthful ambition in a range of creative disciplines. (See the portrait on the preceding pages, and the work highlighted here.) One in seven residents here is a foreigner, more than in any other big Italian city. The lone Milanese at our photo shoot, the furniture designer Mario Milana, moved back to the city in 2022 after 18 years in New York.
Milan has struck, like nowhere else, the ideal balance of modern speed and enduring quality, a place where respect for the past can lead to radical change. It is (along with Trieste) the least Italian of Italy’s great cities, but if you think of this financial center as some transalpine Frankfurt, you’re missing out big time. Business destination?
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