Italy: Business As Usual In Milan
By Vince Donovan

There’s no hot like the Milan subway in July. I’m trying to put a mille lire coin into a payphone, but my fingers are so sweaty that it falls onto the grungy floor and disappears through a grate. The cigarette smoke is thick around me and I’m starting to get dizzy. Commuting Milanese push past me, trying to get to the subway turnstiles, but they are blocked. A line of square-jawed Carbinieri—the state police—stand in the way, arms folded. It might be as innocuous as a mechanical breakdown, but whatever the reason for the police presence, no one’s getting past the turnstiles. The stifling hot subway station is just getting hotter as more and more Italians crowd in, and I’ve got to call my new editor to let him know that I’m going to be late--really, really late--for our first meeting.

People are pressing so closely around me that I’m having trouble digging in my pockets looking for change. It’s as crowded and uncomfortable as actually riding the Milan subway, which I have done twice a day for the past six months, wondering how the locals always come out looking cool and well-pressed. I, lacking some Italian gene or vitamin, invariably emerge sweaty and wrinkled.

It’s so crowded that I don’t notice the tiny Italian nonna, grandmother, at my side until I nearly jab my elbow in her ear. She’s wearing a starched black dress and carrying a handbag the size of a blacksmith’s anvil. She’s saying something to me, but I can’t hear her over the noise and bustle. I bend down (she’s maybe 4'8" in very clunky heels) and let her yell into my ear. “Chiama la mama?” she says. Are you calling your mother?

The woman has a stern look, but I laugh out loud. The station seems to breathe a little and my dizziness subsides. The crowd parts enough so I can reach up and wipe the sweat from my forehead. Though we are packed into the station like Sardinian anchovies, there seems to be a no-pushing zone around the nonna. She just stands there, determined. She has coins in her hand and clearly wants to give me one to call my mother.

“No, senora,” I say. I desperately need to call my editor, but I have this feeling that lying to a nonna is a particularly evil sin. “Devo chiamare l’ufficio.” I need to call my office.

“Va bene,” she says. Her voice scrapes like new shoes on gravel. She grabs my hand in her bony claw and presses a coin into it. “Prima, chiamara l’ufficio.” First call your office. “E dopo,” she says, wagging a crooked finger in the air and giving me another coin, pressing it with uncanny force, “CHIAMARE LA MAMA!”

It was going to be another one of those days when the Italian urban soul, for good or bad, was working its magic. Milan is a big city, ugly by Italian standards, and sophisticated. It’s an international center for fashion, banking, and manufacturing. The Milanese disdain the idle romantics of the south and secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) are proud that their city was actually part of Austria for a few centuries.

But for all of their sophistication, the Milanese lack the cool indifference of New Yorkers or Parisians. Back up on the street (only slightly less hot than in the subway inferno) I reach for a taxi just an instant behind another businessman, an Italian, beautifully dressed with a gleaming red leather briefcase. I’m prepared for a battle (I really am late) but he graciously offers to share the cab. We travel for a few blocks before he compliments, in good English, my own briefcase, a soft-sided leather bag I just bought in Florence.

“Grazie mille,” I say. It’s not easy to impress an Italian, especially in the area of fashion.

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