Milano

A consistency problem
Carlo Oliva

Milan continues to attract the workforce, but is no longer the center of economic development than once was.
And I explain why we must abolish the risotto alla Milanese.

Difficult integration?
Not surprising, of course. In a city that from its name, in form as in the Latin Mediolanum Celtic-Germanic Midland, insists on his own centrality, as if to say about being in relationship with different elsewhere (because the median is, of course, to something else) and whose history has always been characterized by a tendency to build traffic and, therefore, to attract outsiders, a city whose economic growth, especially in the industrial age, has normally been fed by immigration, which brought the total of the three or four hundred thousand inhabitants that were in when someone (the government of Empress Maria Teresa) for the first time took the trouble to count, to two million, which was close to the middle of last century - not counting the suburbs and satellite cities - in such a city, then, that the cuisine has a strong international footprint is something normal. Growth, for Milan, has always been about acceptance of diversity, at the price of some crises and some effort to reject.

It will not be a case, moreover, if the various cuisines represented in the local in the strict sense defined as Milanese, today, has a minority position at all, "a niche". It will be expensive because it requires ingredients (butter, of course, cream, fine cuts of meat ...), or because the calorie intake is much higher than that required by the necessities of today life, or will be, simply because that position was pushed by the waves of aliens cooks that slowly have opened shop on the canals. The history of the Milanese restaurant has always been a series of boom: from that of Tuscan trattorias, eighty years ago, the pizzerias, Chinese restaurants and then, Sardinia, Japanese, Mexican, Indian, fast food, the kebaberie ...
Here, the kebaberie. With this kind seems to have been reached in a sense, a point of no return. Are those places in the list of those to which the city government, which has, of course, the consensus of the vast majority of Milan, decided to go to war, such as massage parlors and internet point. Several recent rulings have, in some areas, strict limits on opening hours, measures aimed at their dispersal, prohibitions related to linguistic signs and other harassment ostensibly intended to limit proliferation.
In some areas, of course. The zones, to be precise, most frequented by foreigners and first-generation immigrants. The war on kebaberie, in fact, is part of that, a much broader scope, that Milan's leading center-right against those immigrants who, with characteristic hypocrisy, it now uses to define " extracomunitari".

The ideology of the village

Even this is not the case of surprise. Milan continues to attract the workforce, but is no longer the center of economic development than once. Closed factories, dispersed network of workshops, dissipated the professionalism they eat, focused on a number of activities largely parasitic, clearly unable to represent a driving force for the city's economy. As a result of its growing service sector has gained a strong social imbalance in the sense that he favored and continues to favor the interests and lifestyle of the middle and higher classes offering products and services that much of the population can not afford. Municipal administrators encourage a mindless construction activity, at the request of the builders lobby, creating one after the other neighborhoods destined not to find people. The velletarismo clashes with the ineptitude, with the result that works of absolute banality (the excavation of a subway, the underground parking, repaving of a street ...) are lost in all kinds of difficulties, require biblical times and produce an urban landscape of unfinished rubble. The city is moving in vacuum, in a series of uncontrolled tremors, but can not hide its decay. It is from this decadence, of course, that originated the ideology of which we have referred, the refusal of provincial diversity, afraid to face the challenge of globalization, shut themselves up inside the nest of a reassuringly traditional identity. With all the problems we have, for this ruling class, there are also other foreigners to make some noise. That the ideology of the village is not the most suitable for what continues to want to be a metropolis, there seems to be of interest to anyone.
They can do well, of course. Everyone has the right to choose the identity that they deserve and their administrators. It will be interesting to see where they will take us. In the meantime, however, do a favor and give up the risotto with saffron. It's a matter of consistency: the only one, presumably, within their reach.