On a city that takes craft seriously — and the buildings, interiors, and objects that demonstrate why
Milan does not separate design from architecture from manufacturing from culture. The argument is that these are the same thing, and the city is built around demonstrating that the argument is correct.
Milan does not separate design from architecture from manufacturing from culture. The argument — made consistently since the 1930s when the Triennale was established as the international exhibition for applied arts and architecture — is that these are the same thing, and the city is built around demonstrating that it is correct. The Triennale di Milano, in its 1933 building by Giovanni Muzio in the Sempione park, is still the best version of the exhibition as argument: not a market, not a trade fair, but a continuing investigation into the question of what design is for.
The Pinacoteca di Brera, which is the permanent art museum rather than the design museum, occupies a Baroque palace in the Brera neighbourhood and holds the best collection of Northern Italian painting outside Venice. The Mantegna dead Christ in the room after the main staircase is the painting that every account of Italian art eventually arrives at — a foreshortened Christ on a stone slab, the feet toward the viewer, the perspective technically perfect and emotionally merciless. The gallery is large enough to lose track of direction in, which is the correct condition for a museum of this age and density.
The applied craft argument is most concentrated in the streets east of the Corso Buenos Aires and in the Porta Romana neighbourhood: workshops producing handmade furniture, metalwork, textile printing, and restoration work that have maintained their addresses in the industrial buildings that used to be foundries and now cost more per square metre than anything nearby. They remain partly because the city's design industry still needs them, and partly because the Milanese attitude toward continuity of use is more persistent than the property market logic that has emptied similar areas in London and Amsterdam.
The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II — the 1877 iron-and-glass arcade — holds this all together as a spatial type. The Galleria is not a shopping centre that happens to be beautiful. It is a specific form of civic infrastructure that understands commercial activity and cultural aspiration as one continuous act. Camparino, at the corner toward La Scala, has been at that corner since 1867. The coffee is correct; the room understands what it is.