Off to Milan this weekend, but what do I know about Milanese culture
This one is complicated.
I realized today that I’ve forgotten more Milanese stuff than I managed to keep.
—>>Previously on Long Play: Off to Prague, but what do I know about Czech culture
Umberto Eco was Milanese, which I didn’t notice until now, and set most of his non-historical fiction in the city. Milan is also where his personal library of 30,000 volumes lived. I’ve read Foucault’s Pendulum probably in my early twenties and didn’t make much of the fact that the three publishing professionals in the novel live and work in Milan. “Three Milan editors,” reminds me an online blurb, “who have spent much time rewriting crackpot manuscripts on the occult, decide to have a little fun. Their plan encompasses the secrets of the solar system, Satanic initiation rites, and Brazilian voodoo. A terrific joke - until people begin to disappear.” Pendulum protagonists over the many hundreds of pages try to connect all the conspiracy theories into one encompassing paranoiac take on history, at first as a joke. I remember the pages on the Templars and the Illuminati, then completely new to me, which connect to the masonic conspiracy theories of the later centuries. You could see that Eco had fun with the novel but I didn’t know what to make of it myself. It’s possible I was too green or that the jokes went over my head. I am eyeing his last novel now, the 2015 Numero Zero, a slimmer number on a different conspiracy theory - one arguing that the Mussolini and Claretta Petacci murdered and hung upside down in a Milanese square were actually body doubles, and that the real Mussolini had not been killed by Italian partisans but continued his life underground. Eco’s last novel is also set among the Milanese chattering classes, but this time we are following a ghost writer hired by a media magnate who believes in the Two Mussolinis theory.
The Betrothed, I promessi sposi, the national Italian novel of the nineteenth century written by Alessandro Manzoni, I’ve also read a million years ago. Do I remember much about it, no. The two young people become engaged, go through countless adventures, finally reunite for the happy ending, is all I can say about it. I had meanwhile misremembered the historical period—was sure the story was set in Ottocento, turns out it was set way way before Italy was a twinkle in anybody’s eye, in the 1600s, the Duchy of Milan under Spanish rule. (It bears mentioning here that Lombardy has been French, Spanish or Austrian for longer than it’s been Italian.) There is a chapter on the plague, for which Manzoni consulted De peste quae fuit anno 1630 by a prolific Milanese scribe Giuseppe Ripamonti, who was a Milanese Samuel Pepys of sorts. (Pepys wrote about the plague in London some twenty years later). Just don’t ask me how Lucia and Renzo handled the plague.
The Charterhouse of Parma, a novel by Stendhal. This is the only Stendhal I’ve read, and this too was yonks ago. Apparently, some Milanese content there? Upon consulting Wikipedia, I’m realizing that there isn’t very much of it. Yet La Chartreuse features in literary tours of Milan, as does Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, which barely has a chapter set in Milan?
Dario Fo was Milanese, another thing I’ve never noticed. Born near the Lake Maggiore, lived in Milan most of his life. Growing up in Montenegro, we had two Italian RAI channels beside the two state channels of the Yugoslav Radio Television, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Fo’s performances on TV at some point, doing what we’d now call one-man show, standup or spoken word, but his was probably a mix of the three. He called his shtick giulleria: whatever the joglars (an Old Occitan word) do, the minstrelsy, the bouffonerie, the jester-ing. He and Franca Rame, his artistic partner, saw giulleria as the original popular form of literature - and the Nobel Prize Committee agreed that it is literature in 1997, although it requires live performance.
What does the jongleur talk about for hours? He’s retelling history and the Bible and is free-ranging through European cultures. I grabbed this translation of Fo’s best known play from the North York Central library, though a lot of it in performance is available on YouTube, mostly without subtitles, taken from a RAI recording, I expect. There’s an unusual edition of Mistero Buffo from New York City online too, in which Fo chops up his ordinarily fast routine into sentences so the interpreter can translate to English.
Back when I interviewed Tim Parks for this very publication, he recommended I read his novel Destiny, which is partly set in Milan. I did… and it’s a superbly written but phenomenally claustrophobic novel which I wouldn’t necessarily recommend as a pleasure activity. (A middle aged Anglo man in Italy tries leaving his overbearing Milanese wife after their institutionalized, severely depressed son takes his own life.) I did have a blast with Hotel Milano, his most recent novel, a covid comedy.
What else, what else…
I’ve trawled the internet and the library archives and found a few potential things of interest.
Dino Buzzati. A very Milanese writer who however set his most famous book, The Stronghold (also known in English as The Tartar Steppe; influenced Coetzee) at the ramparts of an imaginary empire. A Love Affair (1963) which NYRB Classics reissued last year, is actually set in Milano, so I am going to look for that. It’s a story of a man frightened of women who frequents brothels (ah, yes, that old Euro genre) and becomes obsessed with a cruel young thing. Hello, Wedekind’s Lulu, Maugham’s Of Human Bondage? Or something completely different?
Carlo Emilio Gadda is considered one of the most important Italian modernists and a peer to Luigi Pirandello and Italo Svevo. (That other Italo, Calvino, was a postmodernista, like Umberto Eco… a distinction I want to write more about at a later point.) While he’s best known for the novel That Awful Mess on Via Merulana (Quel pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, 1957) which is set in Rome, his Milanese novel is transposed to an imaginary Latin American country. The Experience of Pain (La cognizione del dolore, almost finished in 1941, unpublished until 1963) is about Mussolini’s Italy, Milan and the region in particular, and had to be disguised as “Maradagal”, a militarist, clientelist, until recently feudal country. An old villa is occupied by a mother and son duo (second son never returned from the last war), and there’s a menagerie of characters around them, all affected by, or the expressions of, the community’s sickness in some way. The helpless son becomes more and more violent towards the mother…
Any women in Milan writing interesting things? Hivemind, I’m going to have to put you to work.
Movies
I can’t recall anything except Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love, which is so relentlessly beautiful, it becomes tedious. Expecting more of the same, I have not watched Call Me By Your Name.
From the black and white era, there’s Rocco and His Brothers by Visconti, in which a southern band of brothers try to make it in the relatively wealthy north of Italy…
…and A Miracle in Milan by Vittorio de Sica - in its entirety on YT, in a somewhat fuzzy transfer.
There are at least two critical films on Berlusconi: Nanni Moretti’s Il Caimano (watched; vg) and Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro (I think I watched it? I think it’s vg? See what I’m telling you? It’s the Milan Memory Failure Syndrome.)
Opera
La Scala is closed for the season until its traditional opening night on December 7, when Riccardo Chailly conducts Verdi’s La Forza del destino. A quick browse through the season tells me that there’s an opera based on Eco’s Name of the Rose coming up... hilariously, it too with only one female role, which the composer redressed by introducing two trouser roles for mezzo-sopranos. Fine. Good. I like that Adso of Melk will be sung by Kate Lindsey. Can’t wait for those production photos.