Page 26 - Milano Periferia

with bare factory chimneys and blue gazometres among the swallow wires,
the rough and steely landscapes spotted by overbridges and grey sheds.
where we brought, on the bike rod, our secret love.,.

The outskirts of long ago come to my mind, but with no regret, as I cannot
believe they do not exist any more, at feast by pieces and scraps: that
mixture of the rural and the town, of the countryside which appears and
disappears in some relaxing glimpses, in some openings of verdure? of
late-liberty provincial-styled buildings which become less and less fre-
quent along roads which become more and more silent, the ditches which
lapped the crumbling walls of the houses and the soft flabella of some
willow-trees, disappearing under the mezzanines for a few stretches and
then appearing again, gay between lines of washing-stones and wash-
houses, the lonely and dreary warehouses, the unexpected alleys flanked
by dazzling white walls, the low factories with the sequences of triangle-
gabled sheds with brick medieval-like latticed windows, the smoke-blacke-
ned small stations clanking with pistons and plungers, near to plaster-
fenced level crossings, and then: the inns, cheese - bread - salami - wine -
flies, the small nearly deserted cinemas buzzing with old motion pictures,
and lastly: the poplars gently standing by the last houses; nimble and gra-
ceful they pointed to the sky with their long-limbed branches so closely
fitted that the foliage rustled with the least breath of wind. The poplars
were the coryphaei, the guide-trees, the friendly grace, the darting park
filing amid the first canals and the variegated fields of the lonely outskirts.

Thinking it over I become aware that the suburbs represented the meeting-
point between the eternal longing for a natural idyllic life and the massive
reality of a fermenting ever-enlarging town which continually spread out
with new factories and industries, but with the working classes still showing
in their rustic simplicity their earthy origin.

Progress could be perceived there, but with no feeling of distortion. On
the outskirts we became more conscious of our being town-dwellers, but
at the same time, torn away from our tiny cosy shelters, we could deepen
the awareness of our human growth. Among the people, the workers, the
country-men we felt unloaded of the centre, almost weightless, nearer to
the dark heart of the race (the "species" of Pasolini), thrown into the
oncoming of the world.

There we seemed to find the denied dream of communitarian living, and,
on the other hand, the real difficulty of surviving, there the comfort of
brotherly neighours and otherwise the ancient tragic drama of daily life.

FIFTY YEARS AGO

I do not know if everybody, whether Milanese or Cisalpine, Cenomane or
Rethan, remembers that in Milan the outskirts followed more or less the
first tramway ring (29 - 30), called the "circonvallazione" by antonomasia