Page 27 - Milano Periferia

and they were within a stone’s throw from the centre. At a short distance
from the Arco della Pace, after about five hundred metres along Corso
Sempione called Napoleona, a name which reminded one, as Savinio
wrote, of a plump gigantic landlady, you found the open countryside domi-
nated by the sight of Resegone, the paths through the green, and the
ditches with such clear waters as to lend themselves to healthy bathes;
and so along via Ripamonti, beyond the bridge of San Luigi the urban
tissue loosened abruptly as this area was considered as the least healthy,
the lowest (truly only by a few yards) and the foggiest: you found imme-
diately the ragmogers or "rôttamatt", with the dull suburbs of the pallid
mysterious reign of Vettabbia.

The old tram "Gamba de legn" (Wooden Leg) carried out, puffing away,
its last spectacular loop between Viale Cirene and Viale Lazio, which was
then a flat meadow full of trees, shuffling off the tired powder picked up
on the journey from the southern areas; while Morimondo, fine fabulous
name, not far away from Porta Lodovica was an attraction, looking like
a picturesque small village within the town, where you willingly went for
a walk or a cycle ride stopping perhaps in some inn to eat the delicious
fish from the ditches. And in the places of the old Fair Trade, between
Porta Nuova and Porta Venezia, the bastions still showed off leafy graces,
almost reminiscent of Armida’s gardens: Stendhal restored to life could
still have found, after opening the gig door, the romantic itinerary dedica-
ted to his wooed women, who slyly opposed the revolutionary Napoleon,
guilty of the Milan cold.

But who were the inhabitants of the outskirts of dear memory? First of all
the workers "operari" in dialect, when "lavoradori" was not yet a trade-
union term), the shopkeepers, the wood and wrought iron craftsmen
-someone may still remember the "Cesare di Via Canonica" - the shoe-
makers so skilful in making handmade shoes, the whitewashers or "pitor",
the cabinet-makers or "lustron", the chestnut-cake makers from Tuscany
whose king was the famous "Gigi della Gnaccia", the "sostrée", the
"pattée": variegated sapid humanity of workers, who had joined and
mixed with the tenants of the popular nineteen hundred railed houses,
they themselves having begun a kind of contamination since around 1850
between urban and rural society, anticipating in an ingenious way the
communitarian architecture, the Milanese building for excellence whether
at Porta Ticinese or at Borgo San Gottardo, at Porta Vigentina or at Porta
Genova, and organizing the defence of the Milanese "handicrafts".

Especially the workmen were the lords and masters of the old outskirts.
They swarmed by thousands in their overalls and clogs near about the
Bovisa, Greco, Sesto and the Bicocca stations to go to the factories, some
of them dating back to the Austrian period and some born with the rising
of the left, growing more and more numerous around the big buildings of
the Montecatini (the private station of it being the Bovisa) and of the Breda.
I remember the "Ceretti e Tanfani" of Via Durando, the "Feltrinelli Le-
gnami" (Feltrinelli Timbers) of Via Lambruschini, the "Sias" of Via Cer-