en Italie
What a strange time it’s been in Italy so far! I arrived in Milan yesterday and immediately went about finding a place to stay. No troubles there, the Let’s Go guidebook I picked up in Lisbon quickly lead me to the right place - a hostel run by the local Boy Scout council. My initial impressions of Milan, however, weren’t all that good. Everyone was too well dressed! Every sidewalk had become a catwalk! And there’s something about sunglasses - probably not being able to see others in the eye - that felt really unhospitable. And on top of that the entire front facade of the city’s cathedral is covered in scaffolding, and the world-famous Teatro alla Scala opera house is under major renovation and reconstruction.
So I took a train to the nearby town of Como. Como is a beautifully set along the lake with which it shares its name along the southern edge of the Alps. But, of course, I didn’t make the trip just for the natural beauty; there were architectural sites to see! The main reason I went to Como was to see Terragni’s Casa del Fascio. It was one of the many buildings we studied this semester in our class on Communist, Fascist, and Nazi architecture. There must be something in its geometry, its political significance, its setting, its symbolism, or its narrative arrangement that makes the building particularly attractive in more than a merely aesthetic sense. Unfortunately, because it’s still a government building (no, not for the Fascist Party), I wasn’t able to get inside, even after multiple pleas in very, very broken Italian on my part.
Tomorrow: Rome