The light in Milan is yellow. In the day the balconies and buildings are shades of yellow, drawing up colour from the changing sky gleam before the deep sulphuric haze of night pours from the street lamps.
The trams are yellow, the buses, the creamy yellow of so many buildings, the famous Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II by the Duomo.
It’s yellow, Milan.
Bello, Milano.
It’s a difficult city to get to grips with. The Duomo, and perhaps Parco Sempione with the Castello Sforza are landmarks. Big, Italian, famous.
I must have been in Milan four times before I strayed from these places, because whenever I tried I would become panicked in the yellow streets.
I was worried that I shouldn’t be there - wherever I was.
There was some juggernaut of Italian-ness, the deep untouchable vehicle of life, like an ocean wave that people were rising in - and I was not. I was flailing. Flailing the way a foreigner flails when they want the magic of the place they have arrived at, the magic they have heard over tables, far away, or seen in a screen. The magic of opening and closing doors, weaving through streets, getting somewhere and coming home in a city, and without that it is just lonely and different and all one colour and impenetrable.
Milanese everywhere.
I feel like a guest in this city - I feel like ghost - in the yellow which at first did not change.
But something happened the last time I went - a crack formed and I saw something that felt like relief in bluish light.
It was a cold day, a beautiful, older woman dropped something. She crouched in her coat, her heeled boots, in tights, a huge expensive scarf around her neck. As she bent she was little unstable, and I recognised her struggle. She lowered herself down so awkwardly, so packed in her clothes, that I realised that the yellow light was my own fear. That the discomfort was the beginning. That I had to take the light and the edges and name it as a beautiful city and then begin, weave a chair out of it and sit down. If I wanted to. If that was what I needed.
And maybe I don't. Some cities don't offer themselves up to us. Some cities are made for us if we had made different choices, loved in different ways, paused and had patience instead of blistering with expectations. Some cities ask you to begin at the beginning. Like Milan. You have to go inside it to see it. It is not a sticky place - it is not sweating into itself, it is just so. It offers something at every corner, something rather exceptional, I imagine.
