How Milan sold its soul Old elites are no match for new money

The Milanese love their proverbs. You name it, they have a proverb for it: from clothes, to weather, and how ugly boys can grow up handsome. But what they love most are proverbs about their city: and how lucky they are to live there. “De Milan ghe n’è domà vun,” is perhaps the most famous. “There’s only one Milan.” Such weaning self-confidence has long defined the place, a commercial centre for hundreds of years, home to Italy’s fashion industry and La Scala opera house. Milanesi have traditionally seen other Italians as sad unfortunates, lacking the grace or rigour to succeed. Small wonder, then, that civic leaders are claiming the Winter Olympics as yet another triumph. Hosted by the city this year, with Cortina in the Alps, the local mayor has already declared the games “a cultural and social opportunity”, its $1.9 billion budget invested in a cluster of new stadiums. 

But tonight, as they watch the opening ceremony, the Milanese will see precious little of their town and its history. Instead, they’ll see Mariah Carey, ads from Alibaba and Visa, and signs emblazoned with “IT’s Your Vibe” — the games’ motto and a painful pun on “Italy”. They may also catch a smell: a whiff of corruption that transcends the old Italian cliché and instead carries to the offices of the grandest multinationals on Earth. And, in a grim way, it all feels fitting. Like the games that it’s hosting, Milan, too, seems intent on throwing off a principled past for a fevered global future, even if that leaves it a mere conquest of capital. 

Milan has always been rich. On the trade route from Frankfurt to Rome, its commercial strength was clear even in the 13th century, when local bigwigs built the Piazza Mercanti. Helped by a fertile countryside, and a complex network of inland canals, this “Merchants Square” was soon famed for its quality wares. Henry VIII may have bought his armour from the city, and there’s a reason hatmakers are still called “milliners” today. Affluence endured long after the city’s native dukes were usurped by outsiders. First came Spanish pikemen, then Napoleon; by 1850, Milan was second only to Vienna within the Habsburg Empire, and boasted vast factories in metalwork and silk.

When it joined the new Kingdom of Italy in 1861, Milan was comfortably the most industrialised town in the country. And it’s here, perhaps, that the city’s self-conception truly starts. A relative giant in a nation of pygmies — at unification, it was larger than Rome — Milan gave its residents ample reason to feel smug, especially when recalling their cosmopolitan history. “Genoa is to Milan what Italy is to Germany,” the singer Fabrizio De André once said. He meant it cruelly, yet Milanesi revelled in their transalpine links, practically Teutonic in their devotion to hard work and haughtiness. Along the way, almost everything was pressed into marching Milan far from the dolce vita stereotype, from its winter fog to its austere and handsome boulevards. The same is true of Milan’s dialect, its bovine vowels and French and German loanwords so different from more languorous tones down south. 

For decades, in fact, Milan’s self-image was predicated on being a kind of anti-south, especially as millions of peasants came north in search of work. Perhaps its most famous expression is “Oh mia bela Madunina”. The city’s unofficial anthem, still sung by local football fans, is in theory a paean to the gold statue of the Virgin atop the cathedral, for centuries Milan’s highest spot. In practice, though, Giovanni D’Anzi’s 1934 tune is an excuse to compare Milan’s hard-nosed virtues with alleged — and unfair — southern vice. Mocking the melodrama of Naples and Rome, the lyrics pointedly warn that “no one’s ever lazy” beneath the icon’s gaze. D’Anzi doesn’t use the word, but implicit here is an assault on “terùn” — roughly “redneck” and a once-common slur against southerners. 

There’s an irony here. As urbane as the Milanese imagined themselves, their devotion to parochial Italian rivalries, much more than the wider world beyond, meant the city long retained a conservative air. The postwar boom was real enough — the city’s population surged by a quarter in the Fifties — but bluechip firms such as Mondadori (publishing) and Edison (utilities) were basically domestic in outlook. Pirelli gifted the city a new Madunina when its headquarters became Milan’s tallest building in 1961 — but it never really competed with Goodyear, Bridgestone and other global tyre brands. 

Beyond the boardroom, though, this parochialism was clearest on the streets. As late as the 2000s, this was largely deaf to the siren calls of international capital. The Pirelli aside, skyscrapers were few. Instead, Milan was a town of Victorian apartments, wan yellow or pink, their courtyards filled with shade and bloated potted palm trees. Large retail chains were unusual. Instead, there were shoe stores with wooden shelves and terrazzo floors, and tobacconists owned by men in beards and faded English smoking jackets. There were trattorie, too, more social clubs than restaurants, where sergeant-stiff waiters served saffron risotto and a pig-head stew called cassœula. Foreign fare was hard to find. Amazingly, Starbucks only arrived in 2018, and came with a marble-topped counter. 

Now, though, this stolid world is crumbling. Over the past decade, some 5,000 foreign millionaires have made the city their home. From American tech bros to Egyptian plutocrats, they have many reasons for coming. Tired of Mayfair phone-grabbers, let alone New York’s squalor, some are drawn to the Lombard capital’s sedate reputation. Geography matters too: just as medieval merchants prized Milan for its strategic location, their successors can ski in the morning and check their Swiss bank vaults at lunch. The Italian government has also welcomed newcomers, levying a flat annual tax on foreign income and assets.

The results are predictable. House prices have leapt by 40% in a decade, costs rising as square-footage goes down. Milan’s luxury property market is proving especially wild, with American, Chinese and even Azeri financiers all racing to snatch up smart palazzi. That naturally makes life harder for lawyers and doctors and other bourgeois professionals — precisely the sorts for whom Milan’s no-nonsense reputation was made. Most middle-class Milanesi can today only dream of a Prada handbag, despite the firm’s 600 worldwide stores. 

Don’t let that last figure fool you: even if outlets in Beijing and Chengdu help soften the blow, Milanese fashion has also suffered. In 2023, a number of luxury brands were forced to abandon their traditional rivalries and face down foreign competition together. Even that, apparently, is not enough. Police have uncovered sweatshops in the suburbs. And if that hints at the ways the new Milan leaves space for malpractice, there are other examples too. The city’s construction boom has already caused scandal, with senior officials accused of taking bribes in return for rushing through permits.

Of course, Milan is no stranger to graft. The so-called “mani pulite” investigation of the Nineties — ultimately resulting in the destruction of postwar Italy’s political class — began here. Silvio Berlusconi made his millions here too. Yet as so often in the city today, it’s hard not to feel that corruption is more frantic and financialised than ever. Amid the usual claims of mafia involvement in the Olympics, prosecutors are also exploring Deloitte’s role in an over-invoicing case. Nothing has been proved, but the consultancy’s “digital services” work for the event is darkly symbolic of the city’s new economy.

And on the money men go. In 2024, over 1,000 manufacturing firms failed across Milan and its hinterland; countless other Milanese businesses, including the stock exchange itself, have been bought up by foreigners. They still sing D’Anzi’s ballad, meanwhile, but AC Milan supporters today back a team owned by Wall Street. There’s a new Madunina too — a gold replica was fitted atop the Allianz Tower in 2015, for a time the tallest building in Italy, and a further sign of modern Milan’s transnational sovereigns. As for hometown legend Pirelli, its largest shareholder is a chemical giant from Xiong’an, and its fame is as much in calendars as tyres. 

Once again, though, this upheaval is clearest on the streets. Eighteen towers have now crossed the 100-metre mark, flanked by sleek living blocks named things like “CityLife”. The number of supermarkets has risen by three quarters in a decade, at the expense of 91 bakeries and over 150 shoe shops. Many that remain are brighter, slicker, their shelves in plastic and their tiled pavements gone. At the tobacconists, the patriarchs are out, replaced by poor migrants selling vapes. Indeed, a broader demographic transformation is also underway: one-in-five Milanese were born abroad, fomenting a culinary revolt and familiar tensions elsewhere. But if these phenomena are related — Italian business lobbies hard for more immigration — for the moment it’s capital that truly robs your breath. Milan now hosts a half-dozen Starbucks, the latecomers dumping the pioneer’s marbled flattery. There are KFCs, too, and near a wonder of a Romanesque church, a Five Guys. “The grills are hot and the doors are open,” proclaimed the managers when it opened in 2018. 

The speed and scale of this shift make Milan in its pomp seem almost touchingly naive, now it faces forces so much huger than “terùn”. Still, it’s Milan’s desperate eagerness to adopt the language and mores of a culture it thrived without for decades that’s most galling. As energetic and ruthless as the multinationals are, after all, no one forced Milan Fashion Week to partner with Starbucks. The way to understand this capitulation, I think, once more involves the city’s myopic form of worldliness. Rather like the Aztecs, lords of their valley yet broken the moment Cortés appeared, the Milanese — in their commerce, their streetscape, their very identity — are utterly helpless before the torrent of customs and cash now unleashed upon their town. Their own traditions were too slow, too aged, too reliant on rhythms lost to time, and easily replaced by servile English puns and bloodless tributes to “shared values”.

Once big money tempts you, then traps you, it’s very hard to flee. So while foreign cash may bring benefits today — jobs, investment, a certain ineffable smoothness — the Milanese should still be fearful. Of course, shimmers of the old town cling on. You can still find good cassœula, especially past the ringroad, and the courtyards will still tempt you in the August sun. All the same, you sense that something vast and special is ending. In December 2024, unhappy at their team’s New York owners, AC Milan supporters unveiled a banner at their San Siro stadium. “We give honour to our champions,” it read. “Symbols of a Milan that no longer exists!” Time, perhaps, for a new proverb.

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