What the canal district is before it becomes the aperitivo hour
Between 2pm and 6pm, the Navigli district operates at its own scale. The tourists have not yet arrived for aperitivo. The residents are doing the work that makes a neighbourhood function.
Between 2pm and 6pm, the Navigli district operates at its own scale. The tourists have not yet arrived for the aperitivo hour — which begins at 6 and by 7:30 has turned the canal-side streets into something more like a performance of Milan than the thing itself. But in the afternoon the neighbourhood is what the neighbourhood actually is: a canal district in a flat northern Italian city, occupied by the people who live and work there.
The Naviglio Grande — the larger of the two surviving Milanese canals — was the primary commercial waterway that carried marble and materials to build the Duomo, a construction that occupied the city for six centuries. The canal is now bordered by a cycle path, the old navigation towpath, and the sequence of bars, galleries, and antique shops that the neighbourhood's gentrification installed without entirely erasing the commercial character that preceded it.
The MAG Café on the Alzaia Naviglio Grande is the correct afternoon position: a corner bar that understands the aperitivo hour but doesn't organise its afternoon around it. The spritz is available from 5; before that, the coffee is correct and the terrace chairs face the water. On a weekday afternoon in October or November, when the city's working rhythm is at its most uninterrupted, this is the Navigli that the photographs try to capture and usually miss: the canal at low light, the plane trees losing their leaves, the delivery scooters and the commuters and the people walking slowly for no particular reason.
Dinner in the Navigli starts later than the aperitivo would suggest: 8pm is early, 9pm is the correct time for a table at one of the trattorie on the back streets. Walk the canal at dusk before sitting down.