The archite(x/c)ture of cinematic Milan

Mythic and clichéd faces of Milan

Milan is a city of many clichéd faces associated with the city’s history. It is traditionally regarded as an Italian metropolis, the financial and industrial capital of Italy, the capital of the Italian ‘economic miracle’ and the centre of opera and fashion/design. All these ‘ideological faces’ have their architectural equivalents. Its status as the second Italian city after Rome is embodied in the building of the flamboyant Gothic cathedral, the Duomo (fourteenth–nineteenth century), which has become a widely known symbol and the main iconic image of Milan. The opera house of La Scala (built in 1778) has become an emblem of great Italian opera and of the highly influential position of Milan in the world of music. The face of Milan as a capital of fashion and design is embodied in two architectural monuments. The first is the Via Montenapoleone (the main street of the fashion district), and the second is the oldest arcade in the city, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (arch. Giuseppe Mengoni, 1865–77), which connects two Milanese landmarks – the Piazza del Duomo and the Piazza della Scala. Finally, Milan’s status as the capital of the Italian ‘economic miracle’ (1958–63) is expressed by the Pirelli Tower (completed in 1960) and Milan Central Station (arch. Ulisse Stacchini, 1931), the importance of the latter being related to the mass internal migration to Milan. This ‘hulk of stone, marble, glass and iron’ was ‘the main gateway for those arriving in the city for at least fifty years’ (Foot, 2001: 7).

Thus, all the clichéd ideas of Milan are inscribed in its architectural image, and this image has found its way into Italian literature and cinema. However, in his cultural biography of Milan, Foot calls the city a non-cinematic one:

Milan is a flat city without a river. The light is often bad. It has few monuments of note. These physical and aesthetic qualities alone go some way to explaining the very few films made in Milan since the war. Milan is not, and never will be, ‘cinematic’ in the traditional sense of the word – its ‘cinematic’ qualities have always been much more modern, ephemeral and hidden. (2001: 71)

Certainly, it is doubtful whether someone could argue that Milan is a city-museum like Rome, Venice or Florence. The city-museum always forms some visual entity and inspires the creation of ‘film cartolina’ (a moving postcard). While introducing an integral set of stereotypical signs of the city it offers a kind of cine-tourism. It shows the tourist ‘what to see’, presents the ‘right way’ to experience landmarks and recalls their historical and cultural contexts (Bass, 1997: 85–6). Perhaps Milan is not homogeneous enough to call it a city-museum. Even so, it has a large number of architectural monuments, and the decorative and ideological peculiarities of its space have become the source of inspiration for Italian filmmakers since 1899. Milan Central Station is connected to the birth of Italian cinema whose history begins with Italo Pacchioni’s short documentary of a train arriving at the station, L’arrivo di un treno alla stazione di Milano. This 1899 footage is considered to be the first film shot in Italy with an Italian camera (Moliterno, 2008: 237). Certainly the Central Station had a different architectural form at the end of the nineteenth century (arch. Louis-Jules Bouchot, 1864); however, it was no less impressive than the new one shown in the majority of feature films produced after World War II.

The history of Milanese feature films begins with such films as Mario Camerini’s Gli uomini, che mascalzoni! (What Scoundrels Men Are! 1932), Camillo Mastrocinque and Guido Salvini’s Regina della Scala (Queen of La Scala, 1937), and Mario Soldati’s Piccolo mondo antico (Little Old-Fashioned World, 1941). Camerini’s romantic comedy (starring Vittorio De Sica as Bruno) was an opportunity for creating a ‘film cartolina’ inasmuch as it presents a charming picture of the Milan of the 1930s by combining the most beautiful views of the city. The opera-oriented comedy Regina della Scala tells the story of a fictional composer Luigi (Giuseppe Addobbati) and shows the interior of La Scala for people who would not normally see it (see Chiti and Lancia, 2005: 299–300). Finally, Mario Soldati’s film, based on the 1895 novel by Antonio Fogazzaro, presents a tragic social love story that takes place during the Italian Risorgimento in occupied Lombardy (see Porro and Laura, 1996: 53–5). The film connects Milanese exteriors and interiors, but opposes the outside views and the inside views. The iconic images of Milan create an opposition to the views of the hills and of Lake Como, while the interior of the Palazzo Reale is contrasted to the interiors of other apartments. These spatial conjunctions and juxtapositions reflect the struggle for freedom and unity presented in the film story as such. As Mira Liehm notes, the film created a ‘social world inhabited by withdrawn, suffering women, by heroic strong men, and by model children’ and became a legend which ‘was considered by some as a direct forerunner of neorealism’ (1984: 34). Therefore, the early maps of cinematic Milan show the architectural monuments as signs of ideas, and reveal the city as a space of personal drama (tragic love stories), creativity (especially in music), and the Italian struggle for unity (when showing the Risorgimento period).

In the post-war period the model of the city on screen was transformed. Italian filmmakers enhance the interpretation of Milan as a space for personal/social drama; however, they obliterate almost all the signs connected to the cultural and musical history of the city. Furthermore, they often turn the iconic images into hollow indicatory signs of Milan. The post-war history of Milan on the screen begins with two masterpieces – Michelangelo Antonioni’s Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair, 1950) and Vittorio De Sica’s Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951). The first forms a spatial dramatic tension between Milan and Ferrara. Although it presents several Milanese landmarks, it often reduces them to fragments (the camera frames only parts of the buildings). This architectural partiality hollows out every iconic image as such and turns it into the spatial analogue of a personal conflict. De Sica’s Miracolo, in turn, creates a spatial tension between three places that are meaningful in relation to each other – the ‘fairyland’ of Totò and Lolotta, Milan (presented by the dominating close-ups and high-angle shots of La Scala, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, the Duomo and its streets) and the city Totò creates outside Milan. While playing with dimensional differences between human being and monument, De Sica configures a socially divided cityscape in which Milan becomes the emblem of an unfair and unjust city in opposition to Totò’s fairy-town and shantytown. Thus, at the very beginning of the 1950s Italian filmmakers contrast Milan to a real or fictional other place, which, in De Sica’s vision, gains a precise axiological dimension. When opposed to a certain other ‘good place’ Milan becomes the incarnation of inhuman forces and tendencies.

In the 1960s and later, the city becomes the locus for different genres of films, all of which show Milan as a place of action. The urban space of Milan is used as a scene for drama, ² comedy ³ (gangster-comedy ⁴ ) and the poliziotteschi ⁵ film. However, regardless of the genre, almost all the films ‘depersonalize’ the city or contrast it to the rural south and the city’s suburbs. The indicatory gesture often appears in the title and/or the opening sequence as if sufficing as a perception of Milan as a city of crime, ‘of work, of factories, of bustle and of wealth’ (Foot, 2001: 83). Such a gesture of depersonalization or juxtaposition to a ‘better place’ perpetuates the judgement.

The best symbol of social drama, which shows the conflict between newcomers from different parts of Italy and the city, is the dedication from Ermanno Olmi’s Il posto (The Job, 1961), presented in the opening sequence of the film: ‘For those who live in the towns of Lombardy, Milan is the place to find a job.’ Apart from Il posto, which shows the city under construction without any architectural monuments, social conflict was represented in a number of films starting with Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and his Brothers, 1960) and ending with Massimo Venier’s Generazione mille euro (1000 Euro Generation, 2009). Visconti’s Rocco opens with the station signboard ‘Milano’ and the train’s arrival at the Central Station. However, it does not show the impressive exterior of the station and continues with the dirty edge of the city and the Alfa Romeo factory. The film shows the Duomo and the Galleria from above, yet these iconic images are used to create a contrast to the industrial image of the Alfa Romeo factory, which in turn exposes the underside of immigrant life in Milan. This opposition of émigré Milan v. ‘native’ Milan spatially marks the social conflict revealed by Visconti’s film. Venier’s Generazione (a story of postgraduates trying to find work in Milan averaging about 1000 euros a month), a film created much later, also exhibits the ‘backside’ of Milan – its underground, the pedestrian subways covered in graffiti, Malpensa Airport, the ordinary glass building of a marketing company, a hospital, a café and a basketball court. Even the high-angle long shot from the balcony of the company building does not fix on the landmarks of Milan, and the majority of the city views are associated with movement and motion, thus becoming the spatial background for the ideological tensions of social conflict.

Personal drama, starting with Antonioni’s (The Night, 1961), also presents Milan as a hostile space. The film’s credit sequence begins with the Pirelli Tower and then presents industrial Milan from above as a reflection in the window glass of a skyscraper. As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith argues, Antonioni reaches a high point as an urban filmmaker with La notte:

Antonioni’s modernist concrete and glass city differs radically not only from the immediately postwar neorealist version but also from that portrayed by Luchino Visconti in Rocco and his Brothers a year earlier. Visconti’s Milan, although it has modern bits, is historic, and the filmmaker dramatises the city, using its landmarks – the Central Station, the spiky Gothic cathedral – as settings for dramatic action. For Antonioni it is more a matter of textures and surfaces, aural as well as visual, checkered patterns of rough concrete and smooth glass, the cacophony of motor horns translated into quasi-musical harmony. (2001: 105; see also Brunette, 1998: 109)

Antonioni focuses on a resistance-filled urban context. He reveals the discordant nature of the city. His smooth, cold textures or surfaces metaphorically repeat the lack of contact between the characters. As opposed to the out-of-town villa of the night party, Antonioni’s daily Milan is cold, muddy and damp. The anonymous backdrop of industrial Milan functions as a ‘metaphor for the estrangement between the film’s protagonists’ (Celli and Cottino-Jones, 2007: 104).

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s drama Teorema (1968) and Liliana Cavani’s drama I cannibali (The Cannibals, 1970) also depict Milan as a place of action. Nevertheless, when representing typical, but not exclusively Milanese, buildings and streets they do not show any iconic images at all. Both films obliterate all the memorable signs of Milan in such a way that the city becomes a metaphor for an abstract cruel modern urban space. The gesture of obliteration is also evident in poliziotteschi films: for example, Lizzani’s Banditi a Milano (The Violent Four, 1968), Fernando Di Leo’s Milano calibro 9 (Caliber 9, 1972), Sergio Martino’s Milano trema – la polizia vuole giustizia (Violent Professionals, 1973), and others. These films indicate the place of action by the title and by iconic images/buildings represented in the opening sequences; however, they again turn the landmarks of Milan into the signs of an unjust criminal city. Even Italian (gangster) comedies such Nanni Loy’s Un audace colpo dei soliti ignoti (Fiasco in Milan, 1959), Alberto Latuada’s Il mafioso (1962), Vittorio De Sica’s Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 1963) and Adriano Celentano and Pietro Vivarelli’s Super rapina a Milano (Robbery Roman Style, 1964) imbue the textual Milan with negative connotations. For instance, Lattuada’s Il mafioso shows Milan as a city of work and workmen, contrasting it with the scenery of the film’s main setting – the idyllic life of rural Sicily. The Sicilian villa Palagonia in Bagheria reveals the joyous and improvisational nature of periphery, and, in comparison to this periphery, Milan gains a ‘gloomy’ ideological meaning. One of the love stories in De Sica’s Ieri, oggi, domani begins with a sequence of Milan ‘for show’ which is presented by the medium shots of famous buildings seen through the window of Anna’s Rolls-Royce (as if appropriated by her). This Milan ‘for show’ is again contrasted to its suburbs where the representatives of two different social classes (Anna and Renzo) are able to exist together. A similar device is used in the gangster comedy Super rapina a Milano. The gangsters’ flight over the Duomo after a robbery at the very beginning of the film clearly refers to the final flight of De Sica’s beggars in Miracolo. The high-angle shots of Milanese landmarks from a helicopter (the Central Station, the Pirelli Tower, the Duomo, the Galleria) are almost a repeat of the final sequence of De Sica’s film and, in a similar way to the beggars of De Sica’s shantytown, the countryside monastery in this film gains positive ideological implications (it becomes the space which makes the robbers more humane), while Milan is endowed afresh with negative connotations. Entertainment films, such as Marco Risi’s romantic comedy Un ragazzo e una ragazza (A Boy and a Girl, 1983), which partially creates an impression of a ‘film cartolina’ and includes music accompanying a sequence of Milan ‘for show’, ⁶ again impoverish the symbolic connotations of Milanese monuments and blur their connection to the specific sides/faces of the city.

Although this is not an exhaustive list, it is representative of post-war Milanese films, which appear to repeat similar narrative devices of representation. All of them show Milan as a place of action. The majority of them show iconic images of the city. However, the only monument, which is usually ‘filled with content’, is the Central Station – the gateway to the city, i.e. the image connected to the precise idea of Milan as a cruel metropolis. The other monuments appear to be disconnected from the idea of the cultural and historical diversity of Milan, and from the plurality of its faces. They are turned into indications of the capital of the ‘economic miracle’, which is merciless towards ordinary humans and human feelings.

Thus, despite the fact that the majority of post-war Milanese films show architectural buildings that imprint different faces of Milan, they do create a uniform face of Milan as an ideologically callous object that has a cruel influence on human life. Furthermore, the majority of Milanese films establish links with the cinematic Milan created in earlier films (the most evident is Celentano’s reference to De Sica’s conception of Milan and to the peculiarities of its formal presentation). The majority of films place Milan in opposition to other cities/places, giving it negative connotations. Even so, the same majority do not create any parallel and/or positive references to the films or literary texts representing other cities. They never imply any positive analogical relation between Milan and other places. Nevertheless, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century Italian cinema was changing this ‘negative’ map of Milan.

The mirrored face of Milan

The process of change began with Luca Guadagnino’s Io sono l’amore, starring Tilda Swinton who summarized her comments on the film in the following way: ‘Watch this space’ (Jacobson, 2010: 23). Io sono l’amore presents the story of Emma (Tilda Swinton), the Russian-born wife of a Milanese textile manufacturer Tancredi Recchi (Pippo Delbono) and underlines the significance of its location. The opening sequence first presents close-ups of architectural monuments and high-angle shots of streets, and then, as if introducing the second title of the film, assembles these views with the inscription ‘Milano’. Later on, the film shows San Remo, London and an anonymous Russian city. While inscribing the toponyms San Remo and London and hiding the name of the Russian city, the film creates a three-part structure of space (Italy, Britain and Russia), and divides it into the ‘real’ (entitled) and imagined (untitled and hidden). The tripartite structure of space is mirrored in the use of three different languages: Emma speaks to her son in Russian, and Italian is used for communication by almost all the other characters with the exception of Tancredi’s English-speaking business partners.

When creating this spatial and verbal triplicity, the narrative uses devices that associate city and human, city life and human life (human biography). These devices frame the story of Emma’s family life and form the patterns for its inner progress. Whereas the camera’s journey to Emma’s story in Tancredi’s house begins with shots of the Central Station (i.e. of the gateway of the city), it finishes with shots of the famous ‘gateway to another world’ (Milan’s Monumental Cemetery). After the cemetery sequence, Emma is forced to leave her family, the Recchi villa and Milan. The inner progress of her story reveals a whole series of interconnections between the city and the human being. For instance:

This city = person game becomes more challenging in the conversations of Guadagnino’s characters, namely when Tancredi’s wife tells Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini) that Emma is not her real name:

Later on, this conversation is mirrored in a different manner: in the last episode with Tancredi, after Emma declares, ‘You no longer know who I am’, he answers, ‘You don’t exist.’

Emma’s words replace her personal name with a particular toponym, Kitezh, which is repeated in all the visionary fragments of her Russian past as a personal name. Thus, in addition to the replacement of a personal name with a toponym, operating as a device of the equation of the person and the city, it also points to a certain city. Kitezh is the name of the mythical city miraculously saved from the Mongols and hidden at the bottom of a lake. A well-known version of this legend, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Tale of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya (1907), concentrates on the figure of the prince’s bride whose prayer for the city makes it invisible (see, e.g. Nederlander, 1991). The only thing left is the city’s reflection in Lake Svetloyar and the sound of its church bells ringing.

The change of a personal name into this specific toponym equates the character with a peculiar city, and consequently defines it as an invisible one. Such a definition clearly refers to the Italian literary tradition – Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili, 1972), i.e. to a text which offers ‘readers an education in seeing founded upon a new language that communicates the building blocks of utopian thinking’ (Modena, 2011: 92). Furthermore, this particular text explains the appearance of other unclear names in the film, specifically those of Shai Kubelkian (Waris Ahluwalia) and Irina (the Byzantine equivalent of Irene). The latter is presented by the close-ups of the journal with the inscription ‘Irina e le altre’ (‘Irina and others’), which provokes Emma’s remembrance of her Russian past and the appearance of Kitezh as a name. Calvino’s Invisible Cities relates conversations between the famous Venetian Marco Polo and the great emperor of the Mongols, Kublai Khan. The cities Marco Polo describes are referred to by female names. The eighth chapter of the novel, entitled ‘Cities and Names. 5’, introduces a description of a city named Irene:

Irene is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes. For those who pass it without entering the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is a city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene. (Calvino, 1974: 124–5)

A slightly changed spelling of the names (Kubelkian → Kublai Khan; Irina → Irene) does not overshadow the essential device. The association of the person with the city turns them into a special kind of reflection of each other. This device of city ↔ person reflection forces us to pay attention to the mirrored nature of Guadagnino’s cityscape. Its structure is noticeably a repetition of the spatial pattern of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, i.e. of the exact film which Io sono l’amore refers to in the close-ups of Emma’s/Kitezh’s coiffure, namely:

Thus, apart from other heterotopic parts of the cityscape, Vertigo represents museums that find their doubles in Io sono l’amore. The Rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts, which Scottie (James Stewart) and Judy/Madeleine (Kim Novak) pass during their walk, finds its double in Santa Maria delle Grazie inasmuch as the ‘museum of The Last Supper’ is also shown from the outside during Emma’s walk. Another is the California Palace of the Legion of Honor – the place where Scottie sees the pivotal portrait of Carlotta Valdes and the close-up of Madeleine’s/Carlotta’s coiffure that is repeated in Guadagnino’s film. This portrait and the place of its exposition perform a significant role in the dialogue of Io sono l’amore with Vertigo. Unlike the other works in the permanent museum collection shown in the film, the portrait of Carlotta was created exclusively for the film (the author is considered to be John Ferren, see Auiler, 2000: 43, 83). The portrait depicts a fictitious woman imitated by Judy as Madeleine and transformed by Midge when she redraws the portrait with her own face.

Io sono l’amore also presents a real museum – the art gallery at the Villa Necchi Campiglio. It becomes the fictitious Recchi mansion, still essentially playing itself, though, as Guadagnino says, ‘it’s pure coincidence that the fictitious family’s surname is Recchi’ (Limnander, 2010). ⁸ Almost all the paintings ⁹ shown in the film belong to the permanent collection of the Villa Necchi museum, including two still-life paintings by Giorgio Morandi and a genre painting by Fausto Pirandello, Donne che se pettinano. Even so, one of them also appears to be an exception, although of a different kind from Hitchcock’s. It is the portrait used for the film’s posters, marked out by close-ups and introduced as Tancredi’s wedding gift to Emma (‘Tancredi gave it to Emma as a wedding gift’). As distinct from Vertigo’s ‘portrait of Carlotta’, the portrait from Io sono l’amore shows a real historical person, Praskovia Kovaleva-Zhemchugova, eighteenth-century Russia’s greatest soprano, by the Russian serf painter Nicholai I. Argunov. The painting belongs to the temporary exposition of the Kuskovo Estate Museum, and is the least well-known of all the portraits of Praskovia. ¹⁰

This portrait connects the fictitious figure of Emma, equated to the lost city of Kitezh, with the figure of a real person, Praskovia. It represents the serf actress/singer who in 1801 became the wife of Count Nicholai Sheremetev. The legend about this mésalliance has become part of the history of Fontanka House (Sheremetev’s Palace) in St Petersburg. This monument was closely associated with Praskovia, as it was the place where both Praskovia and her son were baptised and where Praskovia’s coffin waited for its final blessing before her burial (Smith, 2008: 13). The essential contribution to this person = building metamorphosis was made by the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), ¹¹ who spent almost three decades of her life in the Fontanka House. Moreover, it was Akhmatova who associated herself with ‘the woman of Kitezh’ (‘kitezhanka’) and who immortalized Praskovia and the Fontanka House in her verse (see Harrington, 2006: 157), especially in The Way of All the Earth (The Woman of Kitezh):

None to see that I’m wounded

Or hear when I moan.

My city is Kitezh,

They’re calling me home …

Now the woman of Kitezh

Journeys alone,

Without brother, or friend,

Or the man I loved first,

Bearing only a pine branch

And one sunlit verse

Dropped by a beggar

And picked up by me . . .

In my last dwelling place

May I find peace.

According to Solomon Volkov, the poem reveals that Akhmatova ‘considered herself a denizen of the vanished Kitezh. At that moment, she associated the legendary Kitezh with the beloved city on the Neva that had lived through such horrible trials. By 1940, Petersburg’s image was transformed from the antithesis of Kitezh to its twin’ (1995: 346). Furthermore, Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero (‘a Petersburg tale’) was also interpreted as a tale of the invisible city of Kitezh (see Rubinchik, 2005). As Nancy K. Anderson puts it:

Akhmatova spoke of the Fontanka House itself as ‘getting involved in’ the Poem. Its involvement is that of a representative of the city’s history, a living presence continuing across generations – ‘witness to everything that goes on’, as the maple tree in its courtyard is described. (2004: 227–8)

Thus, the Fontanka House has become the architectural embodiment of both Anna and Praskovia (Parasha), and this relationship – in a very curious manner – was embedded in a sketch to the Poem:

What are you muttering, midnight?

In any case, Parasha is dead,

The young mistress of the palace.

The gallery remains uncompleted –

This capricious wedding gift,

Where, prompted by Boreas,

I am writing all this down for you.

Incense streams from every window,

The beloved lock has been cut,

And the oval of her face grows dark.

These lines by Akhmatova foretell the actions in Guadagnino’s film – the gallery/portrait as Tancredi’s ‘wedding gift’ to Emma and the change of Emma’s/Kitezh’s haircut (‘the beloved lock has been cut’).

Therefore, the painted portrait of Praskovia, presented as Tancredi’s wedding gift, functions as synecdoche. It shows the ‘part’, which represents the ‘whole’ – the stories of both Praskovia and Anna sharing a large number of similar inner and outer events. Yet, the story of the Russian emigrant Emma/Kitezh becomes a metaphor for the stories of the singer (or actress) and the poet with a minor transformation of the model. If in Anna’s case she is ‘a woman of Kitezh’ compared to the one architectural monument (the Fontanka House), in Emma’s/Kitezh’s case the human character is equated to the (invisible) city. Io sono l’amore accentuates this ambiguous metonymical and metaphorical relationship between Praskovia, Anna and Emma/Kitezh when it reveals the visual resemblance of Tilda Swinton and Akhmatova and shows the change of Emma’s coiffure visually alluding to the two types of hairstyle on Akhmatova’s photos and painted portraits.

Whereas an allusion to the reason for the first transformation of Emma’s image is hidden in the ‘depth of the wedding portrait’, i.e. in Akhmatova’s lines, the reason for the second transformation is shown as a result of the influence of the book L’Atelier simultané, which Emma buys in San Remo. The camera repetitively frames the book, which helps Edoardo understand the relationship between his mother and Antonio when he sees her visual transformation: the new dress copies the dress in the book. His acquaintance with this book becomes the ulterior reason for his death and the end of Emma’s family life.

The function of the book is the same as that of the painted portrait. L’Atelier simultané di Sonia Delaunay, 1923–1934 by Annette Malochet (1984) depicts an Parisian avant-garde artist who has grown up in St Petersburg. Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) was a famous painter and fashion designer of geometrically patterned textiles ‘as ways of articulating bodies in space’ (Giorcelli, 2011: 38). The appearance of the book about Delaunay’s art and the incarnation of its images in Io sono l’amore remind us of several important aspects of Delauney’s artistic activities, which seem to be important. The first is the co-design of the ‘livre simultané’, La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France, 1913). Created together with Blaise Cendrars, the book is dedicated to musicians. It is constructed like a concertina on a two-metre-long sheet of paper and spatially alludes to the train which ‘lends the verse (as the poem itself states) its medley of rhythmic patterns’ (Shaw, 2011: 144). It describes a journey on the Trans-Siberian Express from Moscow to Harbin, marked on the map at the top of the sheet. It begins with a flashback to the travelling poet’s adolescence in Moscow and ends with a flash-forward to his future arrival in Paris. It superimposes on top of each other the times, names, cities and countries, the different fonts of the letters, the letters and images, the letters and colours that fill all the space between the letters and, at the bottom of the sheet, introduces a symbol of modern Paris – the Eiffel Tower, created by Cendrars’s words and Delaunay’s images (see Cendrars, 2008). Blaise Cendrars was also the author of another book devoted to the creator of the musical variant of the Tale of the Invisible City of Kitezh, Rimsky-Korsakov: Rimsky-Korsakov et la nouvelle musique russe (1913). Moreover, Delauney herself contributed to the costume design of Le Vertige by Marcel L’Herbier (1926). Regardless of the fact that this silent film presents a different story from Hitchcock’s, albeit with the same name, it shows the Petrograd (the former St Petersburg) of 1917 and the French Riviera, and, similarly to Hitchcock’s Vertigo cited in Io sono l’amore, represents love, jealousy, visual doubles and murder. Thus, L’Atelier simultané and its cultural context set a hidden pattern to Guadagnino’s cinematic design of superimposing countries and cities, places and languages, monuments and human figures, cinema and painting, poetry and music on top of one another.

Therefore, the portrait and the book, as shown in Guadagnino’s Io sono l’amore, hide and reveal the patterns that associate the story of Emma/Kitezh and Milan with the story of the other – the other person (singer, poet, designer) and the other city. This other city appears to be St Petersburg, which is associated with Milan by the principle of transitivity. ¹² The association is introduced in the very first shots of the film, and becomes visible exclusively through the ‘depths’ of the portrait of Praskovia and the book about Delauney. As mentioned above, the opening sequence represents the sculptural horses and the horse tamer on the roof of the Central Station. The shots perform the proleptic function of foretelling the horse-racing theme, which results in the appearance of Antonio in Emma’s life. In addition, the close-ups of the horse tamer isolate this image from the visual Milanese context and form visual links to a whole series of iconic cultural signs of St Petersburg, in particular:

All these signs have become part of the city’s myth as explained by Lotman, who differentiates the city as a symbolic space from the city as a symbolic name. He considers the former (the city as a symbolic space) from the point of view of its relationship to the surrounding world, makes a distinction between concentric and eccentric cities, and describes St Petersburg as an eccentric one. The peculiarities of the eccentric city include:

Lotman’s notion of an eccentric city is equally applicable to St Petersburg and to Milan including the argument of the city’s location ‘at the edge’ of the cultural space connected to water. Milanese waters are invisible nowadays, yet in the nineteenth century Milan was a large inland port with a long (about 150 km) system of 124 canals (navigli) connecting Milan to Lake Maggiore, Lake Como and the Adriatic. The construction of the navigli system started in the twelfth century with the participation of Leonardo da Vinci. However, in the twentieth century (up until 1979) the canals were filled in (Pugliese and Lucchini, 2009: 11–12). Therefore, even the canals (water) ‘equate’ the cities (Milan and St Petersburg), at least in the past.

Conclusion: the versatile face of Milan

Thus, while narrating the story of a Russian immigrant in Italy, which is interpreted as a political melodrama ‘combining a sociopolitical critique of contemporary Italian society with the use of a romantic plot line’ (Bauman, 2013: 103), Guadagnino’s Io sono l’amore creates a narrative of the city. It inscribes the architecture of Milan into the cinematic (archi)texture in a highly exotic way. While mapping the character’s body and storyline it destroys the boundaries between the human figures and inanimate objects, and assembles the events of a human life in the same way as it arranges the pieces of the city. This arrangement, including names, objects and figures of ‘alien’ culture, combines the past and the future, the real and the imaginary, the distant and the adjacent, and creates a new model of a metaphoric city – a new model of the (textual) Milan. This intertextual model reminds us of the cultural history and cultural activities of Milan – its singing, acting, painting, literature and design. In contrast to the earlier attempts to constitute the textual Milan as a ‘dystopia’ in the literal sense of the word, Guadagnino’s film (re)constructs the city as a personalized mythic/geographic/aesthetic/intellectual entity. The map of this entity includes elements and ideas taken from previous models of the textual Milan. When representing Milan’s famous architectural monuments, the film offers a kind of cine-tourism. When showing the social and personal conflict of the emigrant Emma, it includes elements of (social) drama. When presenting the development of Emma and Antonio’s love story, it involves the elements of detective fiction. The enumeration of devices and elements could be continued; however, when they are connected to the cultural history of Milan, all the devices change their status and reveal the different sides of a personified cultural Milanese cityscape as different to the one created earlier.

The revision of the cinematic city map of Milan brought about by Luca Guadagnino is not a unique phenomenon in Italian cinema. A similar revision is made in the film that creates an ironic relationship with Io sono l’amore by name and (partially) by theme – the Italian film under the English name Happy Family (2010) directed by Gabriele Salvatores. An adaptation of the play Happy Family® by the Milanese Alessandro Genovesi, which in turn transforms Luigi Pirandello’s Sei personaggi in cerca d‘autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921), the film sets the action in Milan and creates a wide network of references to other art texts. The references cover devices whereby the Milanese cityscape is created according to the pattern chosen to represent Paris in Le Fabuleux Destin d‘Amélie Poulain (Amélie, dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001). Thus, Salvatores also designs Milan as a double – as a mirrored reflection of another city notable for its cultural codes. Such a process of cinematic mapping of the city draws attention to its cultural heritage and inspires the re-evaluation of the peculiarities of the real city. The present-day Italian cinema reveals the necessity to show all the cultural sides/faces of Milan that were hidden under the mask of the capital of the Italian ‘economic miracle’. Still, the revelation of its inner layers and the changes of the cityscape that turn Milan into a cinematic city come about from the outside – from other cultures and other cities.