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Rating: The people you meet, if you ask them: - "To Pentesilea?" - they make a gesture around that you do not know if it means: "Here", or: "Further there" or: "All around", or still: "In the opposite direction".
"The city" - you insist on asking.
"We come here to work every morning" - some respond to you, and others: "We come back here to sleep".(Italo Calvino)
Started in 1906 and, due to economic crisis and war, finished in 1931 the central station of Milan has in itself such a wide variety of styles that make it architecturally undefinable: Liberty, Deco, Rationalism and, due to interventions from the 1920s onwards, Fascist style chase one another more or less disorderly forming what many sources baptize, with an artistic neologism, as Assyrian-Milanese style.
"I decide to leave the house, the walls are suffocating me, but I don't know where to go: I let my thoughts guide me. Outside the city is made of street names I know by heart but that at every corner hide details that seem new to me every time. This winter has killed all the opuntia, which some sadist planted years ago, perhaps hoping for global warming and greenhouse gases. Today the traffic block will force me to remain within the walls of this assembly of villages: but my thought remains on the opuntia and some still-living leaves that will serve for resurrection".
A "legend" states that for Frank Lloyd Wright it was the most beautiful station in the world, the writer much prefers Liverpool Street Station in London, with which the subject of the review has nonetheless more than one architectural link, and if many pompously rhetorical "adjustments", brought from '22 onwards, had not partially deviated its conceptual intentions, probably the statement would not seem so reckless: certainly if the model, as found in Stacchini's notes, was Washington's Union Station, Milan's station dramatically deviated from that idea so much as to be, even today, visually unique and unrepeatable: for better and for worse.
"Not knowing how to be is now a status symbol of this era made of cars not tailored for parking: I think of this as, dissident, my thought wanders in search of some non-hostile face but today is a day of escape for most: as if yesterday was not, of tomorrow, hope tells me, there is no certainty. My step takes on rhythmic contours and fortunately I have no advertising jingle obsessing me. At least today".
The galleries and the central ticket office are the parts, with obvious "classical" ancient Roman influences, that are most influenced by the imprint of the Twentieth, but by trying to divert your gaze for a while from the friezes and monuments in fake marble, often too heavily rhetorical, one cannot help but be struck by the architectural will to create airy environments with rational and rationalistic intent but with an eye on Art Deco, fashionable at the design's start. The vaults above the tracks offer, in their Liberty triumph, the most intense look at that concept of space use mixed with a mesmerizing intent that unfortunately today has been lost, captured by other things.
"I would like to leave but not even public transport comforts me: in my head I would need certain tracks, starting points, arrival points. Physically of certain schedules, not of certainty of punishment, of certain schedules, ticket offices with placid and smiling staff but I find more comfort in the automatic ones but I don't want to give satisfaction to these buildings that glare at me. Thus I remain and rhythmically search for a non-place to take refuge in".
If the concept of "beautiful" is undefinable the concept of "unique" is quantifiable, it's all about taking a stand: in this regard, this "architectural pastiche" succeeds very well.
"But where is the city where people live?" - you ask.
"It must be" - they say - "over there" - and some raise their arm obliquely towards a concretion of opaque polyhedrons, on the horizon, while others point to your back the specter of other spires.
"Then did I surpass it without realizing?"
"No, try to go further ahead".(Italo Calvino)
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