If you’ve never been to Milan before and think you’re going to find a beautiful Italian city – even a beautiful ‘modern’ Italian city – it’s important to let you know now: you’re not going to find a beautiful Italian city. There are parts of Milan that are very nice – the Navigli, the park around the Castello Sforzesco, and certainly the neighborhood around the Brera – but if you’re coming to Milan half-expecting to float through the glowing fields of Tuscany, you’re setting yourself up to be humiliated. Know that.
But if you know Milan and you like Milan and you’re looking for someplace to eat while you’re there, you can’t go wrong with the Fioraio Bianchi Caffè on Via Montebello. “Fioraio” means “flower-seller,” and it’s a theme that certainly isn’t wasted in the interior, a space plum filled with them, and – if you’re in the city on a rainy day – the notion of surrounding yourself with flowers isn’t an entirely unwelcome one. If you’re having dinner, try the John Dory fillet with champagne and artichoke sauce and crushed potato. If you’re having lunch, give the Baccalà cod fish tart a try.
When you’re done, you’re right near Via Della Moscova. Take your after-meal walk there. Not only is there a small bookshop near a Carrefour and a local market you can poke your head into, not only is there an okay market sometimes set up by the Moscova Metro, but the street is bookended on either side by two different parks – that is, the Giardini Montenelli and the Parco Sempione. Each are worth tossing your backpack to the grass and resting in, though Montenelli struck me as being the better one when I was there in late May.
And take time to take in the granular aspects of the city, too. Wander without purpose. You might – as I did – spot your first Liga Norte politician in the wild, dressed like a New Jersey politician celebrating St. Patrick’s Day year round (green is the color of this far-right, fairly appalling party, and it’s a garish, ugly thing.) You might wander by an acoustic guitarist and a flutist shading themselves beneath a tent from a sun otherwise blazing down on the Duomo, playing what for all the world sounds like a Xenakis-styled children’s television show theme song. You might wander by hyper-modernist buildings being constructed in odd places (a previously empty plaza, a previously empty portion of the Castello Sforzesco) for Expo 2015 and wonder what on earth the city is going to do with them when the Expo is finished, one Italian telling you that the city has no idea, and that people are still somewhat distracted by the fact that seven people associated with the Expo were just arrested, anyway. You might spin your head beneath the glass ceiling conch of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele while successfully avoiding ‘the guys with the bracelets.’ You might wander into a Beppe Grillo rally and then laugh when you realize that he – Roderick Spode-like – is complimenting the quality of a crowd when one person in the crowd could clap and – due to the way in which the area of the Duomo is constructed – it would sound like a thousand people.
Or you might find something else altogether.
