How I Fell for Milan
Dave Yoder for The New York Times
FOR the first 10 years of our relationship, Milan and I were constantly at odds with each other. For my part, the list of gripes included the city’s notorious weather — alternately simmering hot or cold as a dungeon and, since much of the city is constructed over filled-in canals, perennially humid; the dearth of contemporary cultural attractions; the fact that the place becomes a ghost town most Fridays, when any self-respecting (there are no other kinds, really) Milanese of means abandons the city for a weekend retreat in the mountains or by the sea.
Milan Travel Guide - Where to go!
Milan Segway - Milan by Night - Venice Day Trip - Italian Wine Tasting - Lake Como Day Trip - Milan City Hop-on Hop-off - Milan Brera Museum Walking - Cinque Terre Day Trip - Milan Walking - Passionate about Italian design? - Milan Football San Siro Stadium - Bergamo City Sightseeing - Verona and Lake Garda - Swiss Alps Bernina Express Rail - Milan Photography Walking - Da Vinci's Last Supper - Serravalle Outlet Shopping - Foxtown Outlet Shopping
Discover the world of fashion in the capital of glamor and style, Milan. If you love fashion and shopping then try Milan Half-Day Shopping Tour...
In print, I carped about the consistent lack of ideas on the catwalks of a city that prides itself as a capital of fashion. And, upon occasion, I will concede, I went too far.
When once reviewing a show by a pair of designers who hail from the south but who live and show in Milan, I wrote that their latest collection seemed pitched at a streetwalker preparing to make her first communion, and the Italian press got hold of the wisecrack.
Even now it is hard to believe that a news cycle was ever slow enough that a quip about a fashion show could make headlines, but that one did. Denounced on Page 1 for affronting Italian culture, I was taken to task on the editorial pages of the Corriere della Sera, the nation’s leading newspaper, gently chided at Milanese dinner parties, banned from certain front rows and hounded for commentary by an Italian television crew that trailed me to Paris.
The tempest blew over; eventually Milan and I made up. And that is good, as I would hate to be alienated from a city that I came to love over time.
It is not that Milan changed. It remains a vain and superficially dull and distant city, a place whose citizens, as an American friend who lived there for years once said, are at times so aloof they make Parisians seem like members of the Welcome Wagon. But, as happens so often in relationships where emotional attachment forms around habit, I fell for Milan.
It took four visits a year for a decade, but I developed an affectionate knowledge of a city that, far from flaunting its many cultural treasures, makes itself intentionally difficult to know. You are aware of this if you have ever tried to acquire tickets to visit Leonardo’s “Last Supper.” You can sense it from the blank look that greets you when you mention to locals the treasures (a moody Francesco Guardi gondolier shrouded in Venetian mist) at the Poldi Pezzoli Museum, a wonderful institution few Milanese of my acquaintance have ever visited.
You know it if you have spent the frustrating hours I have trying to crack the mysterious code governing business hours at the anachronistic enterprises that — once you know them — make Milan a shopper’s heaven. Although every visitor to the city is likely to know its Golden Triangle (more like a quadrangle of streets studded with outposts of every luxury goods label you can name), few realize that country-of-origin prices are only half the reason that shopping at Prada or Jil Sander or Tod’s in Milan is worthwhile. It takes time to discern the varied ways that local buyers for these labels select and choose goods in colors, styles and materials seldom seen at their outposts anyplace else.
Patience is also required to build up a carnet of addresses of the specialty shops fast disappearing from most places, enterprises like the venerable stationer F. Pettinaroli.
Pettinaroli has provided writing paper to the Milanese nobility, grandees and the new rich for over a century (it was founded 130 years ago, in 1881); it is the place where your engraving die is likely to be kept if your name happens to be Visconti or Prada.
Of the printer’s two locations, I prefer the one located on a quiet side street behind the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, its windows filled with engraved lithographic scenes and tasteful writing paper, its wood-paneled interior filled with leather desk articles and sealing stamps that look like props from “I Am Love.”
Because Pettinaroli is maddeningly observant of the siesta that most commercial enterprises in Milan have abandoned, I have often been frustrated to arrive just as the shop closes for lunch. I persist, though, because the stationer is among the last places to find a medium-weight writing paper of a particular fresh blue that was once commonplace and is now a scarcity, and because the crisp clarity of the engraving remains unmatched.
The printing house also stocks stiff note cards embossed with obscure motifs brought out of mothballs from time to time, and then just as capriciously returned to obscurity. A gilded four-leaf clover that appeared one season had vanished by the next; to this day I’m haunted by the error I made in failing to buy the whole stock.
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For the Milanese, materialism requires no apology. They love beautiful things, luxurious things, and it is for that reason perhaps that Italian fashion maintains its global position. Yes, the vaunted “Made in Italy” label often signifies only that the person who affixed it did so within Italy’s borders; an awful lot of Italian design goods are made in Eastern Europe nowadays.
But for gloves and woolens and luggage and certain kinds of mechanical devices, you want the homemade product. And what you cannot find new at places like Sermoneta — a glover whose hole-in-the-wall shop on Via della Spiga sells standards like hand-stitched unlined gloves of calfskin alongside curiosities made of “pony-skin” or peccary hide — you may discover used at Aladdin’s cavelike places like Franco Jacassi’s Vintage Delirium. Like many of the choicest retail stores in Milan, Vintage Delirium has scant street-front presence. A nondescript window in an exterior wall of a bourgeois apartment building barely hints at what is to be found inside the enclosed courtyard where Mr. Jacassi maintains his multilevel store.
It is the rare designer in Milan who has not at some point raided Mr. Jacassi’s stock of used clothing for “inspiration.” The mediocre ones, to paraphrase a remark usually credited to Picasso, merely copy what they purchase. The best riffle through Jacassi’s stock of pristine woolens, 1930s evening clothes and Neapolitan silk ties from the 1960s and, line for line, they steal.
Like Franco Jacassi’s Vintage Delirium, Spazio Rossana Orlandi makes little effort to seduce the average consumer, and to me this reluctance has come to seem a truly Milanese trait. It would be understatement to say that finding this temple to contemporary design is a challenge. Installed in a former tie-factory on a sleepy residential street in the Magenta district, Spazio Rossana Orlandi is secreted inside a courtyard behind massive carriage doors. You have to know it’s there or you will likely never find it. Once inside you will find it hard to leave. With her immense owl glasses and the miniature clown car that are her trademarks, Ms. Orlandi is often seen tooling around town — an unlikely-looking doyenne of Milan’s always-thriving design scene. The cognoscenti have long known, though, that her eye for new talent is fairly unerring. It was at Spazio Rossana Orlandi, for instance, in 2002 that I first encountered the fantastical scrap-wood creations of the Dutch designer Piet Hein Eek. To this day, the store is among the few places where they can be bought.
IN Milan, one learns, some secrets are well kept (the discount outlet of 10 Corso Como, the retailer Carla Sozzani’s multibrand fashion wonderland, is open only a few days a week and is almost perversely difficult to locate) and some are hidden in plain sight.
Almost every traveler passing through the center of the city is bound to have stopped transfixed by the windows of G. Lorenzi, a cutlery shop occupying the best corner on all of Via Montenapoleone.
Lorenzi’s changing tableaux of silver barware, of hunting knives and of manicure sets so extensive you could use them to remove an appendix have a hypnotic effect and not just on gadget freaks.
It takes time, though, and dedication, to sift through the scores of salad tongs hand-carved from buffalo horn, or pocketknives set into stag antler, or crystal atomizers with old-fashioned squeeze bulbs to get at the singular treasures made here. There are things at Lorenzi — a hand-forged corkscrew of chrome or brass, say — so fine and functional they stand as classic examples of anonymous utilitarian design.
I buy one of these every time I go to bring home for a friend, and then use it while still in Milan to uncork the wine I purchase at Peck, a celebrated and family-owned gastronomic temple that makes the food halls of most other metropolitan cities seem mingy and wan. At Peck I also buy a hunk or two of aged Parmesan cheese, vacuum sealed for export and sold at solidly competitive prices, and seafood salads and local bread to eat in the room of my hotel, the charmingly stolid and family-owned Hotel Cavour.
Though I have stayed there for so many years that I know most of the staff by name, repeat visits have never produced special privileges. And that, too, feels characteristic of a city whose diffidence sets it apart.
At the Cavour there is real art on the walls, 1960s light fixtures in the stairwells, mirrors etched with stylized views of the city’s main piazzas at each elevator landing. Smack in the heart of the city, the hotel is minutes by foot from the Roman-era archway that vaults over Via Manzoni and is built into a complex that includes the only branch of the bookstore chain Feltrinelli Librerie with an extensive stock of English-language books.
It was here that I first came upon the translated works of the acidulous satirist Aldo Busi, whose “Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman” seems lamentably little known in the English-speaking world.
From the Cavour it is just a short walk to the Church of San Marco, an austere Baroque complex in whose monastery Mozart lodged for three months in the winter of 1770 while scaring up commissions from local nobles.
On the way to San Marco to light a votive candle, I often stop in to a haberdashery where seldom in 10 years have I encountered another customer. Why this is so I cannot say, since AD56 is not just any insiders’ secret but the place where Lapo Elkann, the style-obsessed Fiat heir, orders his custom-made shirts. Like his late grandfather Gianni Agnelli, Mr. Elkann’s orders are highly specific. Also like his grandfather, Mr. Elkann has a refined appreciation of value. He can appreciate a good deal. At $150 to start, the custom-sewn button-down shirts that I buy there are sturdy and beautifully made and look, in the end, like nothing special. Rather, they are handsome and unostentatious and fine in a way that has taken me all these years to understand defines what is best about Milanese style.
Milan Travel Guide - Where to go!
Milan Segway - Milan by Night - Venice Day Trip - Italian Wine Tasting - Lake Como Day Trip - Milan City Hop-on Hop-off - Milan Brera Museum Walking - Cinque Terre Day Trip - Milan Walking - Passionate about Italian design? - Milan Football San Siro Stadium - Bergamo City Sightseeing - Verona and Lake Garda - Swiss Alps Bernina Express Rail - Milan Photography Walking - Da Vinci's Last Supper - Serravalle Outlet Shopping - Foxtown Outlet Shopping
Discover the world of fashion in the capital of glamor and style, Milan. If you love fashion and shopping then try Milan Half-Day Shopping Tour...
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