Contrary to popular belief, the station was not dreamed up by the Fascists. The design, by a certain Ulisse Stacchini, dates back to 1912, ten years before the March on Rome. But the project was interrupted by the First World War, and by the time the funds were there to resume it, the Fascists were in power and the look of the thing was somewhat altered. It’s the massive volumes of the stone spaces combined with the highly stylised ornamentation that create the special Centrale effect. As you approach the main entrance from the piazza, two solemn horses bow their necks to greet you from forty feet above. Inside the ticket hall, and again high, high above your head, dozens of statues and friezes of classical warriors, their swords, shields and lances in action, alternate with Liberty-like bas-reliefs of trains and planes and buses. It’s Fascism’s double gesture of looking back to the glory that was Rome and forward to some unimaginably efficient, technological Italy of the future. Aesthetically, at least in this space of greyish-white stone with coloured marble and granite inserts, it works wonderfully.
But you see all this beauty only if you lift your eye. And it’s amazing how rarely the eye lifts when you are commuting. ‘Each man fixed his eyes before his feet,’ T. S. Eliot said of the crowd flowing over London Bridge. It’s no different in Milano Centrale. It was years before I noticed the zodiac signs in bas-relief all up one wall of the ticket hall. To make it even less likely that you will really see the building, its grand spaces are being invaded and broken up by aggressive advertising campaigns involving huge poster panels suspended from the high ceiling to swing only a little way above eye level.
At the moment Coca-Cola has taken over the entrance to the station with a score of towering images so brightly coloured that the delicate greys and browns of the stone facade seem as invisible as wet asphalt in twilight. Inside the ticket hall, Naomi Campbell mirrors herself everywhere; twenty feet high in various glossily aggressive poses she shows just how long a girl’s legs can be when she wears a short, tight skirt. I forget the manufacturer’s name. So the archetypal images that were to establish a sense of Italian nationhood, of continuity from past to present and from present to future, are eclipsed by fizzy drinks and fashion goods. A sticky film of postmodern parody wraps around everything that was supposed to be uplifting, majestic. It’s curious to think that Mussolini, who was so enthusiastic about this station, was a sworn enemy of international capitalism, and that when the Americans occupied Rome what distressed him most was the thought that black-skinned soldiers should have captured and, as he saw it, defiled the monuments of ancient empire. I imagine Il Duce, after his summary execution, passing through that portal over which is written ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here’ – perhaps the design (for even the gates of hell must have an architect) is not so different from that of Milano Centrale – only to find an advertising campaign for canned soda featuring the gorgeously dark Naomi Campbell.
IT WAS IN THIS magnificent concourse, some years ago, that I had my bag stolen. Needing to make a phone call, in pre-mobile days, I stopped at a payphone and put my bag down at my feet. The phones are criminally riveted to the brown marble coping. It’s sheer vandalism. I dialled, I listened. Someone was running by. I turned my head to see a young man charging off with a bag, quite a heavy bag to judge by the way it was banging against his leg, the way his body twisted as he ran. ‘Pronto?’ a voice enquired. ‘Rita?’ Already the figure was lost in the crowd by the newspaper kiosk, at which point I realised that that bag was mine. Damn! My old black bag!
The following morning, convinced that no one would have wanted to go far with my students’ theses, a set of proofs, three volumes of Leopardi’s Zibaldone and a change of underwear, I returned to Milan early to see if, abandoned perhaps, the bag might have been handed in as lost property.
While the lower hall of the station is an austere cathedral space across which a stream of travellers constantly flows from metro to escalators, the upper concourse is an interminable and confused milling among shops and bars and platforms as people wait for trains to appear, or try to find a machine that’s working to stamp their tickets, or even a place to lie down and sleep. There’s a constant attrition between the commuters who know how to use the station and move with brutal directness between platform and escalators, and the tourists heaving their preposterous bags this way and that in sleepy bewilderment. I couldn’t find a Lost Property Office.
Eventually I knocked on the window of a glass cubicle with a policeman behind. Much of Milano Centrale is cluttered with cubicles and kiosks and nondescript cabins that seem to have been produced by a later and lesser civilisation than the one that built the station, as if for the past thirty years we had merely been camping in the remnants of an older, nobler time. But that’s true of much of Italy.
Two policemen were smoking, watching a small grey screen. They allowed me to open the door without their going for their guns.
‘Assuming someone found a discarded bag,’ I asked, ‘where would he take it?’
‘A bag?’
‘My bag was stolen.’
They were not so much impolite as uninterested. ‘Why would anyone pick up a discarded bag?’
‘They might feel some sympathy for the person who had lost it,’ I suggested.
It was an interesting idea.
‘I suppose they might bring it here,’ one of the two eventually said.
