MILAN

When Napoleon I (r. 1804–1814/15) entered Milan in May 1796, he came into a walled city of some 140,000 inhabitants. The Lombard countryside began just outside the city walls and there was little industry of note inside. Milan was a trade and religious center—above all for the crucial silk industry—as well as a place of strategic and cultural importance. By the time Italy entered World War I in 1915, the city's population had risen to more than 500,000 and was to be boosted further by the conflict. Milan's walls had been demolished and the urban periphery was beginning to dominate the city center. Smokestacks dominated the first industrial belt and the city possessed a powerful socialist movement, a Socialist Party mayor, a burgeoning working class, and a trade fair of worldwide importance. This rapid development had taken place against the background of occupation by two foreign powers, the Risorgimento, and the slow growth of local and national democracy. By 1915, Milan could lay full claim to being the "moral capital" of Italy, a city where production, work, and exchange were such as to make it the economic and financial powerhouse of the new Italy.

napoleon's influence

Napoleon's rule over Milan was brief but revolutionary. The presence of the French encouraged patriot groups to organize and spread propaganda. The semi-autonomous powers Napoleon granted Milan under the Cispadane and Cisalpine Republics encouraged self-rule and helped to create a domestic political class. Moreover, Napoleon intervened to reshape the urban fabric of the city. The French built an amphitheater—the Arena—that would later host the first game of the Italian football team in 1910, as well as modern palaces (above all the vast Foro Bonaparte complex). The world-famous Brera Art Gallery was enriched by Napoleon by raiding churches and galleries in Italy and even the Louvre, and his statue still stands in its courtyard.

After the French were briefly thrown out of Italy in 1799, Napoleon returned in 1800 and made himself king of the Kingdom of Italy in 1805 in a pompous ceremony held in the city's cathedral (whose facade he had completed). The capital of this kingdom was Milan, and Napoleon set himself up in the Royal Palace. Construction of a triumphal arch facing Paris, through which Napoleon could enter the city, was begun; unfortunately for Napoleon, the arch was not completed until 1838 under the Austrians, although Napoleon III (1808–1873) and the new king of Italy were able to pass through it on their own entrance into Milan in 1859. French rule modernized Milan in other ways. Administrative and legal systems were instituted that are still, in part, in place, especially the prefects that link national and local government.

nationalism and revolution

Napoleon's reign ended in 1814, and the Austrians then ruled over Milan for the next fifty-five years. The 1820s saw the genesis of the nationalist movement in Milan, particularly around the brilliant historian and political activist Carlo Cattaneo (1810–1869) who advocated a federalist version of an Italian nation-state while identifying the roots of the city's industrial revolution in the rural resources of Lombardy that linked organically with the services, markets, and technical expertise of the city. After a series of abortive and sometimes farcical attempts at patriotic rebellion, the Milanese rose up against the Austrians in March 1848. The spark for the revolt was a monopoly over tobacco and snuff, which was merely symptomatic of the way the Austrians taxed the Milanese to the hilt. As revolution spread across Italy and Europe, the Milanese defeated the 13,000-strong Austrian army on the streets and liberated the city during the Five Days; an event still celebrated every March in Milan and marked by a huge monument and ossuary in the city center. Some four hundred Milanese were killed in the fierce fighting, and Cattaneo himself was right at the center of events. The Austrian field marshal Joseph Radetsky (1766–1858) regrouped and re-took Milan after a series of battles some five months later. The movement's failure to link up with the countryside, and the lack of a powerful and radical social base, had proved to be its undoing. Nonetheless, the Milanese would not have long to wait. In 1853 an abortive rising inspired by Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) was brutally repressed, but in the years 1859 to 1861, the city's hinterland was at the center of a series of battles that eventually led to its incorporation in a unified Italy under the Savoy monarchy.

italy's "moral capital"

Italian Milan began to lay the foundations for its future role as an industrial powerhouse. Water power in the countryside was utilized for agricultural production and later as a crucial energy source: "white coal." Impressive engineering works to tap into this potential were constructed across Lombardy, particularly in the Adda and Ticino valleys. In the 1870s, the first important industries began to form in Milan. Pirelli set up its first factory in 1872, and by the 1890s had become an enormous concern producing rubber and other goods on the northern edge of the city. The creation of a commuter railway service—the northern railways—with Swiss investment helped with the mobility of freely available cheap rural labor from the countryside. Meanwhile, a building boom in the city attracted investment and thousands of construction workers. Milan also consolidated its position as a market and commercial center. Five international exhibitions held in the city between 1871 and 1906 helped to create a dynamic entrepreneurial class linked to European markets. Technical and scientific advances were stimulated by the milieu around the city's highly modern Politecnico—a kind of technical university first set up in 1863—and the private Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, opened in 1901.

In the 1880s, what literary critic Vittorio Spinazzola has called "the only serious ideological myth, not empty and rhetorical, elaborated by the Italian bourgeoisie after unification, the myth of Milan, the myth of the 'moral capital,' began to take shape" (p. 317). The 1881 Expo was a key component of this myth. This huge explosion into the public sphere covered an area of 162,000 square meters, and more than eight thousand businesses were represented in rooms of "new machines" and "galleries of work." But what was the content of the idea of a "moral capital"? On the one hand, Milan was the true capital because Rome was not—the myth was a negative assessment of the contribution of Rome and the south to Italy's industrial progress. Milan was modern, industrious, hardworking, honest, productive; Rome was corrupt, unproductive, lazy, and premodern. Rome was the political capital, Milan the real driving force of the nation, its moral heart. On the other hand, the myth was also a celebration of these values in themselves—a series of character traits and concrete realities pertaining to the Milanese worker, entrepreneur, and industrialist—modernity, hard work, thrift, legality, the self-made person. In Milan, D. Papa wrote that "here by day there is always much to do: people go, come back, rush, make themselves busy, they study and they work" (cited in Rosa, p. 42). In addition, Milan was a moral capital because of its cultural strength: it was home to the greatest opera house in the world—La Scala—and the intellectual establishments and classes, including the newspaper Corriere della Sera, the publishing houses and universities, the writers and poets, and scientists and engineers.

Milan was seen as a city of urban planning, of order, of productive intellectuals, the only real Italian city and the only European city in Italy—a city not of no government, but of good government. That not everything was reduced to money and work and the moral "correctives" introduced by the most powerful urban socialist reformist movement in

Italy—with its vast network of welfare and educational institutions such as the Società Umanitaria—meant that capitalism, it was argued, had a human face in Milan. The moral capital ideal was thus an organic mix of dynamism, modernity, gesellschaft-values, paternalism, collective enterprise and humanity. For all these reasons, and despite the dark side of Milan revealed in journalistic inquests, "Milan," as historian Giovanni Rosa has written, "was convinced, just twenty years on from Unification, that it really was the 'moral capital of Italy"' (p. 21).

Milan also played a key role as a financial center, with the institution of modern investment banks such as the Credito Italiano, whose sumptuous offices dominated the new financial district near Piazza Cordusio. Milan's stock exchange—the most important in Italy—was opened nearby in 1808 and moved to large premises in 1809 before a special palace was built to accommodate it, also in Piazza Cordusio, in 1901. Milan's commercial mix was complemented by its extraordinary network of small, specialized shops and by the highly popular consumer cooperative movement.

urban growth

The city was also freed up and expanded in the nineteenth century. Huge walls (extending eleven kilometers) had been constructed around Milan in the mid-sixteenth century and remained the boundaries of the Comune di Milano until 1873 when the Corpi Santi, so-called because the bodies of the first Christian martyrs were buried in the ring outside the city walls, was incorporated into the city. Immigrants flooded into the city from the hinterland and across Lombardy, as well as from as far away as Apulia, to work in the new factories that mushroomed across the city. More than 250,000 immigrants came to Milan between 1871 and 1914. Industrial development after the 1890s was rooted in the key areas of metalwork and mechanical industries (Falck, Breda), rubber (Pirelli), munitions (Ansaldo), cars (Alfa Romeo), and chemicals (Carlo Erba). As a result, Milan was a workers' city at the outbreak of World War I. The 1911 census showed that out of an "active" population of 153,000, some 103,000 were workers.

This rapid expansion was not without its problems. Poverty and frustration led to violent bread riots in May 1898 that were put down with cold brutality by the cannons of General Fiorenzo Bava-Beccaris. A state of siege was declared, and indiscriminate arrests hit the reformists—who had opposed the riots—and even some local priests. Alongside the capillary organizations of the reformist movement—inspired by the trade unions and Socialist leaders Filippo Turati (1857–1932) and Anna Kuliscioff (1854–1925)—a revolutionary syndicalist movement began to emerge. September 1904 saw the first general strike in Italy originate in Milan, called by the Chamber of Labor that had briefly fallen under control of syndicalists. Milan had been the first Italian city to set up a Chamber of Labor in 1891. General strikes also swept across Milan in 1906 and 1913. "Red Week" of June 1914 found strong support in the city, and the revolutionary interventionists of the "Radiant May" in 1915 took to the streets to demand—successfully—Italian entry into the war.

The reformists were also very active. Socialists and trade unionists set up local libraries, employment offices, credit associations, "popular" universities, schools, mutual-aid societies, cooperatives, theaters, and newspapers, and constructed working-class housing and formed unions. This organic and hegemonic activity built on the Milanese traditions of craft organizations, skilled work, and artisan socialism. Milan was the innovative urban center of reformist strength from the 1890s onward, the "jewel in the crown" of the gradualist movement. The roots of these ideas of gradualism and integration both formed and built upon such trends in the Milanese working class and middle classes.

culture

Culturally, Milan also played a central role. Apart from La Scala, where many operas by Giuseppi Verdi (1813–1901) and Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) were premiered and which remained the most celebrated opera house in the world, there were the publishing industries and newspapers. The city created the most important newspaper in Italian history, Il Corriere della Sera. Founded in 1876 by textile magnates the Crespi family, the Corriere became a model for all other newspapers and a school of journalism for all the most important writers who worked for the press. The journalistic milieu in the city center, near the paper's head offices, was matched by the cultural and literary milieu elsewhere, ranging from Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873) and Stendhal (1783–1842) in the early to mid-nineteenth century, to the futurist painters, poets, and architects who worked in Milan in the early part of the twentieth century. Milan also set up one of Italy's first silent film industries on the edge of the city in the same period.

changing city

The city's infrastructure matched its economic wealth, with modern electric power, extensive tram commuting systems, train networks, and the canals, which were still a key part of urban transport. Urban growth ate up the countryside, absorbing into the city's fabric the rural buildings that had marked the plains. Villages became part of Milan in a matter of years, and rural work coexisted alongside Fordist factory production. By the time of the outbreak of war in 1915, the city was a heaving mass of workers and worker-peasants, many of whom had maintained their links with the countryside. Political ferment in the city was to transform Italy (and Europe) in the wake of the conflict, as Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) set up his pro-war and revolutionary nationalist paper in the city in 1915: Il Popolo d'Italia. The world's first fascist movement was to be formed in the city in March 1919 under his leadership, and Mussolini himself would take control of the whole country in 1922.

See alsoNaples; Rome; Trieste; Venice.

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John Foot