Looking at Milan [antikvár]

PUBLISHER'S NOTE Every Italian publisher dreams of publishing a book on Milan, for Milan is more than just a city of a thousand faces and a thousand facets, more than just the birthplace of masterpieces and geniuses, more than just a living museum brimming with famous monuments. The city actually embodies a whole life style and thus a special way of working, creating, and indeed conceiving life itself. Whoever decides to live in Milan nowadays does so on the basis of a conscious, carefully motivated choice. He knows what the city has to offer despite its somewhat less than outgoing way of opening up to newcomers, although this aloofness has actually nothing to do with snobbishness or over-bearingness, but is rather a sign of the city's natural modesty and reserve, Milan to the Italians of today embodies the myth of progress and ever increasing industrial surge — the city is efficient, hardworking, indefatigable. The good and the bad of the modern metropolis seem magnified and even exaggerated here. The exterior contradictions of contemporary man and the life he leads burst forth in all their dramatic force as integral parts of the vital tissue making up Milanese life. This is perhaps the most immediate aspect of Milan, the one which we have come to recognize as essential. But stopping here would give us a superficial description of the city. We have tried to go beyond the surface in an effort to discover another Milan in addition to the monumental and famous city everyone knows. This Milan is a somewhat more secretive, halfhidden, more private and consequently a bit more alive. This Milan is the city of everyday people, or as they say, the common man, in which the personality and sold of its inhabitants emerge clearly and fully delineated. Here it is easier to appreciate the artistic beauty and treasures the city conceals within its deepest intimacy. It seems as though there is a Romanesque belltower soaring at every comer and that every single church however tiny preserves some little known treasures