Milan, a city gripped by discord

It is now a daily lament that describes today's Milan and its increasingly evident contradictions and inequalities, but as often happens in recent years the lament welcomes, within it, contrasting visions. There are those who denounce widespread criminality and return the narrative of a metropolis in crisis invaded by migrants and criminals (they always automatically go in pairs for some people) and those who instead try to give voice to the differences increasingly pushed to the corners (not to say to the extreme periphery) of a Milan that seems to have lost its soul and civil reason.

FROM A WELCOMING CITY of opportunities to a city of exploitation, the step is short and, in part, the Milanese capital shows having taken that step, between Qatari neighborhoods and exclusive weekends. But where to start to try to recognize the city of the twentieth century that was for Italy a reference of economic, cultural and civil emancipation?

Certainly the novel by the historian Paolo Colombo, Un sogno così (Feltrinelli, pp. 352, euro 20) helps to stem a void that reduces the city without any contextualization between the post-war period of Rocco and his brothers and the 1980s rhetoric of the "Milano da bere". Two certain elements, but not capable of telling an origin or explaining its perspective.

ATTENTIVE TO THE DYNAMICS that intertwine history and narration, Paolo Colombo, a professor at the Catholic University of Milan who had already given body to the theatrical events of narrated history with the cycle of «History Telling», with this novel of family inspiration manages to fully grasp that narrow passage between private and public events and does so with the plot of a Milanese family in the 50s. The author avoids every stereotype and does so also thanks to a narrative ease, never banal, that makes Un sogno così a vivid portrait of the streets and of that Milanese corpulence that, over the years, has thinned out to the point of changing into a synthesis of both real and questionable Italianness. All this without ever exceeding in a form of trite melancholy, but coloring the pages with a vein of regret for that being in life that seemed to offer a better quality of reality or at least more adherent to the desires and vital impulses of people.

MILAN IN THE 1950s is the Italian frontier, here the first supermarkets arrive, here prosperity brings home more than in other cities household appliances and, on the streets, cars. Colombo uses almost the genre of a romance novel with the love between Carlo and Liliana at its center to give body to that story of how our current society took shape, marked by unacceptable contradictions but which still has at its core the potential of a kind and inclusive way of doing things. A novel capable of plumbing a community, taking the lesson of Giovanni Testori as well as Luciano Bianciardi, with a partly pedagogical idea that is strongly necessary today, where memory loses its value day after day.