City on the Move

"Rome has politics, ruins and the Pope," sniffed a Milanese last week, "but Milan is the real capital of Italy--the financial, commercial, industrial, musical, artistic, theatrical, publishing, jazz and striptease capital. What more do you want?"

To U.S. tourists, Milan seems the most American of Italian cities. With skyscrapers by the score, supermarkets, corner gas stations, public swimming pools, installment buying, and a completely un-Latin pace and bustle, Milan has more the flavor of Cleveland or Baltimore than of Florence or Naples. And that is the way the 1,500,000 citizens of Milan like it.

The Milanese even defend their weather--last year Milan had 200 days of rain, hail, snow, sleet, fog and overcast. They assure visitors: "It's the kind of climate that keeps you moving. In Rome, all you feel like doing is looking out the window." A Milanese is always going somewhere: to his job, or to one of the cafes and bars in the glass-domed Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, or to Italy's largest railway station to board the express to Rome, or to a business appointment in the slim, 33-story Pirelli Building, which is Western Europe's tallest, and was designed by a native son, world-famed Architect Gio Ponti.

More of Everything. Milan last week was the pace setter in the astonishing postwar boom that has enabled the storied country of palaces, cathedrals and antiquities to climb in industrial production to third place in Western Europe. Nearly 500,000 cars throng the streets, which are wide by Italian standards and spotlessly clean by any standards. Traffic moves faster and with better discipline than in anarchic Rome, yet the accident rate is higher. The Milanese have an explanation: local drivers and pedestrians are so engrossed in important affairs that they often forget to look where they are going.

Milan's Borsa accounts for nearly half of all Italian stock-market transactions. Milan's factories pour out motor scooters and motor cars, turbines and typewriters, boilers and books. With less than 1/25th of the nation's 50 million people, hardworking Milan pays 26% of Italy's national tax bill. Sometimes the Milanese jokingly threaten to secede and join Switzerland. If they did, the remainder of Italy would sink in economic significance to the level of Greece or Portugal.

Past & Future. Only two great monuments of the past compete with the streamlined, glass-walled modern city. The 14th century duomo, its pinnacles and spires topped by saints and angels, stands in the geographic center of the city; sightseers and lovers go by elevator to the roof to admire the view of the wide Lombard plain and the snowy crest of Mont Blanc. The grim battlements of Sforzesco Castle still brood over their grassy moat, and Leonardo da Vinci's faded master piece, The Last Supper, is slowly peeling on the wall of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie. The curious tourist will have a difficult time finding a notorious wartime monument: the gasoline station where the battered bodies of Benito Mussolini and his brunette mistress, Claretta Petacci, dangled by the heels. Political passion is not a common Milanese trait, and few like to recall that lynching.

The Milanese like their easygoing, white-haired Mayor Virgilio Ferrari, who is more concerned with improving the city's health (Milan's babies were among the first in Italy to get Salk polio shots) than with the soaring municipal debt, estimated to reach $262 million this year. With typical Milanese optimism he is pushing ahead with enlarging the airport, building a new subway, and preparing the final link in the $20 million turnpike, with its 2,500-ft. bridge over the Po River. It will save Genoa-bound motorists 7 1/2 miles of driving, and time is important to the Milanese.

Migrants & Infidelity. The Milanese take to pleasures as enthusiastically as to business. They spend $30 million a year on entertainment in half a dozen sports arenas, 135 movie houses and 13 theaters, ranging from the Piccolo Teatro, which recently toured the U.S., to many-tiered La Scala, where on opening nights the elegant and jeweled women in the boxes rival the operatic attractions on the stage. The younger set flock to cellar clubs like the Santa Tecla Saloon, where jazz played by a hot combo drifts up through sidewalk gratings and into the open windows of the adjoining residence of Cardinal Montini. Most spectacular recent attraction at Maxim's was Monique, a Parisian stripteaser who disrobed on horseback and ended her performance with a flourish by removing the saddle from her horse.

Though they love their city, the Milanese love to get away from it temporarily. Winters they head for the Alps and skiing; summers they crowd the villas and beaches of San Remo, Portofino and Rapallo. Milanese husbands have a reputation for infidelity to their wives. Explains a top lawyer: "It's not that we're more immoral than other Italians; it's just that we can afford it."

Left to itself, Milan would grow slowly, since families are relatively small, and only five more Milanese are born each day than die. But each day 115 new migrants move in--mostly from the south. Sicilians already, they say, control the fruit and vegetable trade and Neapolitans the retail textile business. Like New York, Milan has always drawn many of its best citizens from somewhere else. Once there, they become good Milanese and stay put.

The ambitions of the average Milanese include a larger car, a weekend villa, a university education for his children and trips abroad--preferably to the U.S. But despite his American veneer, he wants these things on Italian terms, i.e., without giving up his trip home each day for lunch and rest, and without getting an ulcer. "The Milanese likes to get ahead," explains one executive, "but relaxedly."

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