Milan Makes Me Feel Southern Inside

Saturday, forty-five minutes early Who would ever have believed it — I, who am always chronically late, am here at the central station of the Great City of F. forty-five minutes ahead of time and at an ungodly hour, 7.30. Yes, in the morning. What love won't do! And thank goodness I called Trenitalia to check about the strike by the staff of my region, since I had accidentally booked the earlier train, the 7 o'clock one instead of the 8.15. Just as well! Imagine the mess: me turning up at the station to find I have a ticket for a train that has already left! Forty-five minutes early and the train seems never to arrive. I buy the paper but with my shoulder bag and the basket (in the photo) slung across my shoulder I can't open it.

As if I could lean on anything! Hmp! I stand by the Eurostar tracks waiting for the departures board to show the platform of my train to Milano Centrale so I can dash to the carriage. What a zoo of variegated humanity a station is. Floods of commuters wash over this rationalist space in waves. Odd characters surface now and then amid the tide of conformists, white earphones in their ears. A tramp asking for the price of a coffee; a bony beanpole on sixties stilts, blonde mane swaying with great strides from track to track; a handsome young man — yes, Nath, I looked! — fair-haired and casually dressed, reading El Pais without ever lifting his eyes. I'll remain curious to know their colour. At last the train arrives; I take my seat and begin a minute reading of the paper.

When I've finished, carefully noting the books reviewed that I'd like but won't be able to buy — see the previous chapter, entry 'I'm broke' — I decide to spend the remaining two hours studying. Studying??!! Every time my university fees come in I think: "Now I'll really get down to studying, it's nearly two years since I've taken an exam, how shameful!" Most of the time I don't even get into the rhythm, just moving the books from one shelf to another. I text my vain resolutions to Nath and then collapse under the sleep-inducing weight of not even 10 pages read. When I wake, only an hour remains until our embrace. I've a couple of calls to make and the arrival in Milan is quick.

Saturday, at the head of the platform. I get off. I can find nothing to check myself in the mirror. Nothing. Not even a dirty window, nor an advertising board. I quicken my pace; he should be there, at the start of the platform. His coach arrived earlier this time. This time he'll be there. I don't even reach the end and I see him, shaved, completely clean-shaven, scanning the crowd with his eyes. He's frowning, his eyes moving with a quick sweep of the ground over the stream of people flowing past. I stop. I stare at him. I wait for him to look at me, at me alone. I wait and I'm rewarded: he sees me and his face lights up. What a feeling, every time. My heart rises to my throat and at just the right moment it overflows into kisses, embraces and half-finished words. We set off. We leave the great metal roof of Milano Centrale, the big white concourse, and reach the square.

The sun — there's a lovely sun smiling on us. Coffee at the usual bar and off in search of this Via Boscovich. The area isn't bad, close to the station but not too close, the buildings not very tall, flowered and well kept. "It looks like Turin," you say. True, my love, it looks like your Turin. We find the Hotel Serena and the rudeness of its receptionist, but who cares — once she's given us the key to room 21, who remembers any of it! We saved money, true. The room is clean, true. The bathroom is big, true. The machine at reception, who cares, true — but come on, they could at least have strapped together the legs of those two twin beds made up as a double! I simply cannot bear it when the bed splits in two under the weight of our loving bodies!

Saturday and Kandinsky I no longer remember for what logical reason I'd planned the visit to the exhibition on a Saturday — perhaps to avoid the possible Sunday queue, perhaps to go straight there from the five o'clock at which we were to leave and did leave the hotel room, at dinner time, or to have Sunday free to do something else, or for all these reasons together. The fact is, the hotel has one good thing going for it: its location. Once out we're immediately on Corso Buenos Aires, which is not the desolate carriageway I'd walked the previous Milanese weekend. We quickly reach Piazza San Babila without even glancing at a shop window, just taking a coffee — we're broke, aren't we? Straight to Palazzo Reale, we head for the great Wassily. I admit to Nath that I've never studied the abstract painter, neither as a student nor in the run-up to the exhibition.

We go in, both of us ignorant of his poetics, and come out enthused.

Free interpretation from the essential facts provided by the exhibition: V.K., set on a scientific path, approaches art by reducing it to its essence, the juice, the bare bone: VIBRATION, FORM, COLOUR. Every graphic form, every colour creates a subjective relationship with the viewer, who enters directly into contact with his soul.

The exhibition itself is a tourist trap; the important, or rather famous, works are very few. Still, it's well laid out and lit. No purchases at the bookshop and off through the streets of a cold city. But I certainly hadn't let myself be caught unprepared — a good 'southern inside' as I am, following the example of the legendary Totò and Peppino, I put on gloves and hat and so face the bad weather.