At the small bar on the busy circular road near the university where I teach, the barman sprinkles chocolate on your espresso before adding the foam, then a deft wriggle of the wrist as the milk pours from the jug creates the most elegant patterns: spirals, roses, concentric circles. ‘Every cappuccino I make,’ he tells me earnestly, ‘must be the best the customer has ever drunk.’
This man – in his early thirties, I’d guess – is at home in his job. He knows all his customers, their likes and dislikes. He is not studying to become a computer programmer or trying to write a novel or taking days off for theatre auditions. He works very fast and can talk football or politics as he does so. He’s an Inter supporter. When you take your cup from his hands you can feel sure that the next few minutes will be exactly the break you were after. And all this is done without that horrible pretension that hangs around the celebrated coffee houses of Paris with their silly red awnings and clutter of wicker chairs. In Milan, at street level at least, everything is natural, busy, fast and right.
The station is different. The large old bar here occupies the whole of one end of the upper concourse. GRAN BAR, it is unimaginatively called. The letters are a yard-high and illuminated from behind by neon, but the white plastic is grubby and fading. Beneath the letters is a long horizontal line of neon, with a blue-and-yellow pattern, designed to imitate an awning (actually it took me quite a while to realise that this must have been the desired effect).
Unlike all the other outlets in the station, the Gran Bar does not present itself as an intruder, a kiosk camping in a mausoleum, but as an integral part of the original design. So its floor is the same grey stone floor of the whole upper concourse, and shining down from its ceiling are two huge glass chandeliers, each with thirty or forty light bulbs, artefacts that might well have been in vogue when the station was built.
It sounds promising, doesn’t it? There should be a bar in grand style, you feel, in a station of this grandeur. And why not call it Gran Bar, in the end? The waiters wear white uniforms, and this, too, is as it should be. I’m willing to pay a little more for uniformed waiter service, for luxury and comfort and liveried whiteness.
Alas, few experiences could be more depressing than the Gran Bar at Milano Centrale. The last refurbishment, in a reddish-orange with black lines, is looking seedy now. The smeary glass window through which you can gaze out into the station is set in decaying ironwork. The illuminated adverts for ice cream and soda seem to refer to the products of a decade ago.
For a bar meant for table service there are remarkably few tables over a very large surface area, as if perhaps the important thing was to be able to pass easily between them with some cleaning machine. And the tables are small, with yellow tablecloths and incongruous plastic chairs of a dark plum colour. The grey floor dominates. Pigeons slither across it, perfectly camouflaged. The few clients are almost all elderly people on their own. Can they really be here to catch a train? you wonder. They seem to be people who have fallen out of time. Perhaps the ghosts who haunt empty trains are allowed to meet here for their coffee breaks.
As you enter, there’s the till to your left. Aggressive notices warn the clients that they mustn’t bring their own food into the cafe, or order at the bar and then carry their drinks over to the tables. But of course everyone knows this anyway. Almost at once you realise that the staff is hostile. A sort of poison gas pollutes the atmosphere. They don’t want you to be here. They have nothing to gain by your presence. Sit at a table and you risk waiting far too long. Go to the bar and you find you need to pick up a receipt at the till first. If you want to eat, you must first go to the bar to examine what’s on offer, then back to the till by the door to describe it and pay for it, then back to the bar with your receipt to try to catch the attention of barmen who are barely polite.
As I wave my receipt in the direction of two men behind the bar – vainly, alas – a young woman beside me complains that she asked for a macchiato and has been given a straightforward espresso. Instead of apologising and rectifying the mistake with a quick dash of foamy milk, the man complains that she didn’t ask for a macchiato. He’s a southerner, in his fifties, with a supercilious curl to his lip, and a little white hat worn at an angle that suggests he doesn’t want to be wearing it.
‘Actually, I ordered from your colleague,’ the woman says, ‘and he shouted the order to you. He definitely said macchiato.’
The woman is patient, rather pretty, with pale skin, full cheeks and raven hair.
‘Oh, we want to be unpleasant, do we?’ the waiter asks. ‘Had a hard day, have we?’
The woman closes her eyes and very slowly shakes her head from side to side. The waiter’s colleague, a new recruit, hurries for the milk jug.
What’s fascinating here is how the same nation produces such contrasting stereotypes: the resentful, slow, station barmen in the shabby, ill-kept public space, where everything is difficult and unhappy, and the bright and bushy-tailed figure, working twice as hard but cheerful with it in the busy street bar. I’m sure, for example, that the same man, if moved from one environment to another, would change his manner entirely. The quality of his
