Between the 1960s and the 1980s, Italian cinema captured Milan and its social transformations through its most emblematic places – iconic, altered or now vanished. From the old San Siro stadium to the Velasca Tower, from the Fiorucci store to the lights and mist of Metanopoli, we trace a journey made of alienation, dreams and contradictions in words and music with a playlist for drifting and (re)discover the city.

“Lambertoni! Whatever are you doing in Milan in this heat?”
The quip uttered by serial debtor Alberto Nardi (Alberto Sordi) in The Widower by Dino Risi would be enough on its own to capture the entire mood of an era – that of the economic miracle – and of a city, Milan, its undisputed protagonist, where business never stops, not even under the suffocating summer heat.

In 1959, the year the film was released, Milan was charging ahead at full speed, much like its booming construction industry, symbolised by the Torre Velasca, designed by the BBPR studio and completed just the year before. Twenty-six vertiginous floors in full modernist style, flats equipped with wired radio systems, and a concierge complete with uniform and hat embroidered with the Torre Velasca name.

The Boom promised miracles, but mostly intoxicated. It made people take steps longer than their legs. It fuelled a nation of hard workers but also of charlatans and smooth talkers like Nardi. Risi, with the perceptiveness of a sociologist and the ruthless cynicism of someone who had witnessed Italians’ behavioural acrobatics during the war and the Fascist Ventennio, was the perfect chronicler of these monsters. So much so that he wanted to cast Sordi again in Il sorpasso, before making cinema history instead with Vittorio Gassman.

And so the Milan–Cortina Winter Olympics, amid promises of economic stimulus, assorted controversies and the inevitable building scandals, bring back memories of the great illusion of the economic miracle. Times – and Milan with them – have certainly changed. Cinemas show no Olympic-themed cinepanettoni, and Cipollino Boldi has gone from being a symbol of the city to an affront to public decency in the space of a single joke.

And yet there was a long season in which Italian cinema was the city’s privileged narrator: Milan as a paradigmatic city through which directors – and composers too – told the story of changing social customs. Its places – loved, transformed, disappeared – now form an alternative map for navigating the city. A route that CAM Sugar has traced through a playlist, Sounds Like Milano, to accompany this drift and (re)discover the city through the music in its catalogue.

In the early 1960s, jazz and concrete serve to comment on the modernist tension of a ruthless city where, behind the friendly face of consumerism and the promises of the economic miracle, lurks a profound alienation. Emptiness, to paraphrase a film of those years directed by Piero Vivarelli with the powerful jazz score by Armando Trovajoli.

Antonioni’s La notte is a sentimental labyrinth, like the streets of a city under construction: a city that – futuristically speaking – rises, seduces and oppresses. The Torre Velasca returns in La vita agra (1964), embodying this transitory condition in the nightmares of Luciano Bianchi (Ugo Tognazzi), who dreams of walking along its ledge with nothing beneath him but emptiness. “It’s a bitter life, up here. You fall down, and no one picks you up.”

There are the Torre Breda and Torre Galfa, but also the outlines of the buildings and skyscrapers of Metanopoli, Eni’s company town in San Donato, whose neon lights at night provide the backdrop for the raids of the lost youth of Milano nera. To grasp the identity of the film more fully, one must return to the title of the first screenplay, written by Pasolini as a Milanese counterpoint to his Roman Ragazzi di vita: La nebbiosa, the foggy. A landscape note in which the Po Valley fog – a hallmark and stereotype of the city – meets the symbolic mist of the boom’s factories, as well as that surrounding the world of Teddy Boys, murky in the eyes of public opinion.

If in the 1960s Rome is Italian cinema, Milan remains nonetheless indispensable. It is under the Madonnina that Nanni Loy sets Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti (1959), the sequel to Monicelli’s classic. In this respect, the foreign-market titles are revealing: Fiasco in Milan and Hold-up à la Milanese. Accompanied by Piero Umiliani’s jazz, with Chet Baker on trumpet, the film features Milan Central Station among its locations. This is where the ramshackle gang of thieves arrives, posing as Roma fans travelling to Milan. Questioned at the police station about their alibi, Peppe Pantera (Vittorio Gassman) recites from memory the match report read in the newspaper: “Excuse me for saying so, but only twelve [convicted criminals] out of almost a thousand Roma supporters is a negligible percentage – among Lazio fans it’s much higher.”

The tracks of Central Station, together with towers and skyscrapers, are signifiers of the mirage of post-war Milan, as also told in Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960). Black and white accentuates a polarisation of highs and lows: the spires of the Duomo, traditionally a meeting place for young couples, is where Nadia (Annie Girardot) threats to throw herself off, exhausted and embittered by a life (and city) that seem to have no room left for feelings. There is the desolation of the Idroscalo – still far from the redevelopment brought by Expo – and the Visconti Gym where Rocco (Alain Delon) trains as a boxer, a space of social redemption and identity negotiation.

Even when disillusionment at the end of the economic miracle erupts into political violence, Milan continues to be a privileged stage for cinematic storytelling. If Italy’s Sixty-Eight had one of its key moments in the clashes at the Valle Giulia architecture faculty of La Sapienza University in Rome, it is Milan’s Piazza Fontana terror attack in December 1969 what truly ushered in the strategy of tension.

In I cannibali (1969), Liliana Cavani uses Milan as a dystopian space for her contemporary reworking of Sophocles’ Antigone. In a powerful exercise in symbolism and denunciation, Pierre Clémenti wanders through the streets of a city where the asphalt is covered with the bodies of young protesters, wearing a bright red scarf. Music, too, marks this shift. The jazz of Umiliani, Trovajoli and Piccioni is no longer a disruptive language. Instead, it is Ennio Morricone’s dissonance and psych to capture the ethos of the new angry European cinema of Bellocchio, Samperi, Bertolucci and Cavani herself. 

Go deeper into the Milan film locations on the CAM Sugar Instagram account

In San Babila Ore 20: un delitto inutile (1976), a geographical space itself becomes the political signifier of an entire season in the city’s life. The maze of arcades and streets around the San Babila square (where neo-fascists gathered) brings back landmarks of a city transformed yet still faithful to its identity, making the film legible on a level beyond political drama alone. Bygone Fiorucci store and design-savvy Sundown cafè populate the screen next to establishments such as Arlecchino cinema, restaurant Santa Lucia, and Piazza Sempione’s eloquently-named Sex Shop, one of the first to open in the city and still in business today.

San Siro cannot be missing from Milan’s cinematic narrative, still without the towers added for the Italia ’90 football world cup. Empty, in Milano nera, it becomes a theatre of violence and alienation, almost a prelude to clashes involving future generations of ultras. Packed with spectators in Delitto a Porta Romana and Eccezzziunale… veramente it captures a popular, feverish Milan – like the films starring Tomas Milian – where football is a key driver of collective identity.

In the 1980s it is comedy, more than auteur cinema, that interprets the city’s social narrative, portraying the so-called and Yuppy-populated Milano da Bere with its hedonism and class contradictions. Among the many films able to depict this context, I fichissimi (1981), directed by Carlo Vanzina and starring Diego Abatantuono, Jerry Calà and Mauro Di Francesco, remains one of the most fascinating. True to the postmodern condition in which they were born, these films are layered with references, not only aesthetically but also in their comic register, tending towards the absurd and shaped by the cabaret tradition of the Derby Club – another long-gone landmark.

I fichissimi is a hilarious Milanese translation of The Warriors, but also an opportunity to tell the story of working-class Milan, where (now in farcical form) the cultural clash between the autochthonous community and the post-war Southern migrants still persists as a category of the spirit, along with the idea of consumerism as a vehicle for self-affirmation. The film unfolds as a constant dialogue between centre and outskirts: on one side the council housing of Rho (actually filmed in Rome), on the other the guts of the underground and the night, with the legendary Rolling Stone club on Via XXII Marzo, where one of Detto Mariano’s grooviest tracks plays.

It all culminates in a car crash against Piazza Meda’s disc sculpture by Arnaldo Pomodoro – another illustrious Milanese and close friend of the Vitti–Antonioni couple, for whom he designed the aeroplane decor in Zabriskie Point.Meanwhile, in theatres no director seems much interested in carrying on Italian comedy’s social commentary tradition with any Olympic-themed oeuvre. All we’re left with is a rewatch of 1960 Le olimpiadi dei mariti (Husbands’ Olympics): different Olympic Games, but ultimately the same irrepressible Italians.

Opening image: San Babila ore 20: un delitto inutile (1976), detail from the artwork of the CAM Sugar soundtrack by Ennio Morricone.