Milan is an impressive, if not especially attractive, city (by Italian standards, anyway). It is ostentatious about its wealth and conspicuous consumption, and its pecuniary pride is unquestionably reinforced by its even more striking cultural riches, housed in some of the world’s finest museums: Correggio, Bellini, Caravaggio, and Raphael all seem to bestow an artistic blessing on Milan’s cupidity, allowing for a more edifying channel of acquisitiveness. The presence of La Scala and the memory of Verdi, who lived and died here (the city’s authorities famously placed straw on the road outside the room where he lay dying so as not to disturb him), allow for the harmonies of opera to act as a demulcent resonance against the noise of the cash registers.
And then there is, of course, Leonardo da Vinci. He also made Milan his home, for some two decades. His sublime Last Supper (ca. 1495–98) is to be found in one of the city’s splendid ecclesiastical buildings, in this case the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where awed and hushed visitors are as quiet as the monks would have been at their repasts. Even that is not enough for avaricious Milan: the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana has, among its many priceless works, the largest collection of Leonardo’s writings and drawings in the Codex Atlanticus, with folios on display, offering a profound intimacy.
Step outside any of these places of wonder and you are immediately immersed in the city’s rampant and industrious commerce. The city may not be a Verona or Florence to look at, but it shrugs off comparisons with its blatant projection of money. Has not its historical wealth enabled it to be such a leading patron of the arts? Behind all this lies a latent projection of hard power in Italy’s second city. That power is solidified spiritually in the massive scale of the Duomo di Milano, the world’s third-largest church, and practically in the vast fortifications of the Castello Sforzesco, an unambiguous statement of absolute might from the times of its Renaissance princes—the Sforzas—battling their way to authority from a mercenary background in the Italian wars.
But Milan’s relationship to power is not simply a relic of the distant past. Visitors arriving at its train station, the largest in Italy, cannot fail to be impressed by its monumentalism, stemming from Mussolini’s time. The station marks the ongoing importance of the city and its geographical position in Lombardy as both a transport hub and gateway to the country for would-be invaders and conquerors, of which there have been many. As such, Milan has found itself at the center of some key, but not always recognized, turning points in history.
The incursions have not all been sheer physical force, though. By the Edict of Milan in 313, the Roman emperor Constantine granted religious freedom to all his subjects, allowing “Christians and . . . everybody the free power to follow the religion of their choice.” The edict permitted Christianity to flourish in both the western and eastern halves of the imperium; it eventually become the official religion of the whole empire and, consequently, all of Europe—quite a moment.
How mischievous, then, to find in the city’s private museum of Poldi Pezzoli a workshop version of arguably the most famous portrait of Luther, that by Lucas Cranach from circa 1529. Here is a depiction of the man who brought over a millennium of Catholic orthodoxy in Europe to an end. The look of satisfaction on his face suggests that he was aware of his impact even at this early stage of the Reformation, that great dividing line between the medieval and early modern worlds. To have Luther’s eyes from a contemporary portrait peer into the viewer’s own across the centuries creates another, this time highly personal, moment in Milan.
Luther, unlike earlier Germans, did not penetrate very far into sixteenth-century Milan or Italy. By that time, the age of German intervention was over (or at least until the mid-twentieth century). The designs of the Holy Roman emperor—the titular ruler of Germany—and especially of Frederick Barbarossa, had seen the sack of Milan in 1162, before the city and the Lombard League took revenge at the Battle of Legnano in 1176. By the end of the fifteenth century, it was the kingdoms of France and Spain that vied for superpower status, with Italian lands as their field of contest. Milan, the dominant power in northern Italy, was central to these struggles, having reached its apogee in the previous half century under the famous condottiere Francesco Sforza and his son Ludovico “il Moro” (on account of his dark complexion). They renovated the castle named for them, making it one of the great Renaissance courts; Leonardo shared the spectacular creative sphere there with Bramante.
French influence ended in 1525 at the small, neighboring (and prettier) city of Pavia, when the Valois monarch François I, at that point in control of Milan, was comprehensively defeated by the forces of Emperor Charles V (also King Charles I of Spain), which caught the French entirely by surprise. François was captured on the battlefield (in the tradition of French kings, which had become almost part of their job description), and, in a consequential shift of the European power balance, Italy became dominated by Spain, Europe’s unquestioned hegemon. This situation lasted for nearly two centuries, and the rich duchy of Milan became central to the running of the Habsburg Empire. The ramifications of the Battle of Pavia were felt across Europe and beyond, with Spain’s reach spreading across much of the inhabited earth. As the imperial diplomat Lope di Soria wrote to his master, “God has granted us this wonderful victory, which has given Your Majesty absolute power to settle the affairs of Christendom and lay down the law throughout the world.”
Milan fell into a long period of stagnation under Spanish rule and rarely made its presence felt on the world stage for the next four centuries, with one exception being another, very belated, attempted French grab of Italy. In 1805 Napoleon, the formerly republican “Little Corporal,” elevated himself to the vertiginous, and temporary, height of King of Italy in Milan’s cathedral. But Milan made up for its relative quietude a century later, witnessing the birthplace of fascism as a major political force in 1919, when the two hundred or so members of Benito Mussolini’s newly formed Fasci di Combattimento congregated in the city’s Piazza San Sepolcro. Three years later he was the prime minister of Italy, and then, in 1925, the country’s dictator. A devastating new ideology had come to power in Europe, shaping the twentieth century with a savagery only equaled by its symbiotic sibling, communism. Milan had once again become an axis of power.
It was a long way from Milan in 313, but a short trip—around forty miles—to Lake Como, where Mussolini and his mistress Claretta Petacci fled near the end of World War II, leaving Milan on April 25, 1945, in a desperate attempt to reach Switzerland. And that was only after he had, in his fearful and febrile state, considered—and then thought better of—making Milan an Italian Stalingrad. The pair were caught and shot by partisans near the lake on April 28, 1945, an exquisitely beautiful place to die for such a squalid man. The buffoonish dictator met with a farcical end: his executioner, Walter Audisio, could not get either his machine gun or his pistol to work; a fellow partisan handed over his French-made machine gun to get the job done. An eyewitness claimed that Mussolini’s last words were: “Shoot me in the chest.” If this was his usual vanity it did him little good: his last physical appearance was to be in Milan the next morning, strung upside down in the Piazzale Loreto. Lurid stories tell of his corpse being beaten and women urinating on him; other accounts relate how, with religious deference, flowers were scattered to mitigate the desecration of his body. He was buried anonymously in a graveyard just outside the city.
Forty years later, Milan played another central part in Europe’s history, but this time altogether more surreptitiously, which suited a modern Milan where money rather than overt power is more visible. Arguably more emasculated than fortified by membership in the European Union and its great integration project, Italy is now reduced to pockets of wealth in the north, exemplified by the cities of Venice, Bologna, and Milan itself. Milan’s exclusive designer shops may gratingly reflect the wealth that the metropolis can boast, but not so long ago the city was the venue for a defining yet barely known event of huge significance in the exercise of raw power in the shaping of modern Europe. Milan could still prove itself to be at the center of European events and even its destiny.
At the end of June 1985, the European Council of the European Economic Community (eec) met for a conference of member leaders. Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterand, and Helmut Kohl were representing Britain, France, and Germany respectively. Italy being the host country, the chair was taken by Bettino Craxi, the country’s socialist prime minister. Even by the Olympian standards of corrupt Italian politics back then, Craxi, a son of Milan, was in a league of his own: the public would hurl coins at him to show their disgust, while pursuit by judges led him to flee the country for Tunisia, living off funds from bribes, extortion, and the plundering of taxpayers.
The meeting discussed how to forge the eec into a fully-fledged European Union. For this to happen, an inconvenient intergovernmental conference was necessary. Of the ten countries represented, only Britain, Denmark, and Greece opposed the move, but by eec rules this meant the policy was blocked. Craxi, as chair, circumvented protocol by ingenuously declaring that the intergovernmental conference was not needed; willfully distorting eec rules behind a screen of contorted semantics, he bluffed that the matter was a “procedural” rather than a “substantive” issue, thereby obviating the need for a conference. He forced the matter to a vote, much to the outrage of the opposing countries, who were of course outnumbered. This may seem like a story of dry, technical detail, but, through underhand obfuscation and misuse of deliberately complex bureaucracy and procedure, Craxi and his allies paved the way for the formation of today’s arachnidian European Union, which is an anti-democratic aspirational superstate with a malign influence on European affairs.
And where did all these machinations take place? In that intimidating seat of power, the Castello Sforzesco. Renaissance and Machiavellian skullduggery were still at play in late-twentieth-century Milan. The city’s gravitational pull was, and is, still strong.
