Milano Centrale. August 2014
[from FB post: August 5, 2014]
OK friends...two comments so far. They simply do NOT make train stations like Milano Centrale any more... it is kind of OMG when you come out into the public areas/lobby. But.... the walk to the hotel not far from the station was really down and out. Comparing that to Madrid and London, I have to say "Please Milan, you gotta get better than this..."
I lived in Capitol Hill, DC in the early 80s and then in Washington Heights, Manhattan in the late 80s. Those were dangerous times in both places and I look back on it with not just a little wonder. One lingering effect of those experiences was knowing when I was in a place where "I should keep my wits about me". As soon as I walked out of the train platform area into Milano Centrale station I knew it was one of those places. How unfortunate that I had to pass through that grandly down-and-out marble station repeatedly on my trips to northern Italy. I remember my pal MJP telling me when she went to high school in Milan she had to pass through that station as a teenage girl (yikes). Milano Centrale distilled the worst of both Penn Station and Port Authority, New York into one location. I never wanted to linger and I always en garde inside the cavernous lobby. It was the kind of place someone might have snatched your money as your tried to put it into the ticket vending machines - yes, it was that bad.
My first arrival there was still impressive. Wow... what a building! As a first impression of Milan, it blew me away. MJP told me "of course, it was built by Mussolini" which was not 100% accurate since the building was actually started in 1906.
King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy laid the cornerstone of the new station on April 28, 1906, before a blueprint for the station had even been chosen. The last, real, contest for its construction was won in 1912 by architect Ulisse Stacchini, whose design was modeled after Washington Union Station in Washington, DC
...
Due to the Italian economic crisis during World War I, construction proceeded very slowly, and the project, rather simple at the beginning, kept changing and became more and more complex and majestic. This happened especially when Benito Mussolini became Prime Minister, and wanted the station to represent the power of the Fascist regime.
(Wikipedia)
Mussolini did have a heavy hand in the completion and final embellishments of the station and without him, Milano Centrale might have been large but not quite as grand. The fact that so much architecture in Washington, DC is modeled after classical Roman and Renaissance architecture only to have Milan's central station modeled after Union Station (which was itself neo-classical in the Beaux-Arts style) was indeed ironic. Perhaps Milano Centrale copied American transport hubs just a little too closely? It was one of the few large train stations in Europe where I felt unsafe.
Milano Centrale was the station "I loved to hate" in the years where I frequently passed through Malpensa Airport on my way home to the USA [see: Malpensa Airport] and onward to Bergamo [see: Bergamo] to catch Ryanair flights to other European destinations. It never improved and I never dropped my guard there. No worries, for a guy who lived in Washington Heights and took the A Train to Washington Square every day, Milano Centrale was just something to be tolerated, not to be terrified of.
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