Milan: Overview

Edward Hutton visited Milan over a hundred years ago. He began his tour of the city of contrasts with an overview.

I suppose that in all Italy there is no other city so essentially un-Italian as Milan: which yet at every turn continually reminds you of her Latin origin. The true explanation of the paradox might seem to be that Milan is the only town in Italy which, in the modern sense, is a great city at all: she alone is so thoroughly alive, so full of business, as miserable and as restless as the great cities of the North; she alone is wholly without a sense of ancient order and peace; she alone is inexhaustible, a monstrous confusion of old and new, of wretchedness and prosperity, of vulgar wealth and extreme poverty; she alone, in her hurried success, her astonishing movement, her bewilderment and her melancholy, has given herself without an afterthought to the modern world.

 

With this modern city, then, whose sound is the sound of iron upon iron, whose skies are a battlefield, and whose name everywhere in Italy is a synonym for “progress,” this book, and rightly, will have nothing to do. There is so little to be said of any abiding moment for the traveller concerning it, as there would be, for one who was bent on exploring England, concerning Manchester: as little and as much. For both are experiments in a new sort of life, which the best philosophers happily assure us is but a transition to another and certainly a better; they are the creation of what we know as Industrialism, and neither the one  nor the other has yet a hundred years behind it.

 

Milan, however, --and therefore it figures in this book,--unlike Manchester, holds half forgotten within its modern confusion many abiding and a few  beautiful things that have already endured for more than a thousand years. These are our friends; they are in a very real sense a part of us, a part of our spiritual inheritance, and if our civilisation is to endure, whatever changes it may suffer, it seems to me these can never utterly pass away….

 Of the capital of Maximian Hercules, of Constantine, of S. Ambrose, of Valentinian and of Honorius almost nothing remains but these sixteen columns of white marble in the midst of the Corso di Porta Ticinese, which come to us, perhaps, from the third century, and are all that is left of the giant Baths of Mediolanum, or, as some would have it, but with less assurance, of the Palace of the Emperor.

 

I suppose no one can pass these giant columns to-day, in all the hurry of the street, without emotion; they stand there in the midst of modern meanness more eloquent than any pyramid, or the giant and deserted  towns of the plateau of Africa. Those have remembered and borne within only in a solitude, but these in the midst of life and the face of the conqueror. Nor can anything anywhere in Italy bring home to one with a more painful conviction the contrast between the majesty and endurance that were of old and the trumpery and ephemeral contrivances of to-day than those pillars constantly do as one passes them, well, in a tramcar on our way, let us say, to the famous Galleria Vittoria Emanuele.

 

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 80-82.