This week’s travel dream: Tracing history and fashion in Milan

“If Milan were a woman,” said Tom Mueller in National Geographic Traveler, she’d be “classy, gracious, with a sharp business sense and a gift for grand statements.” That took me longer to appreciate than I’d like to admit, as my idea of Italy was fashioned during several indolent summers in the hills of Tuscany. My father-in-law set me straight. “We Milanesi don’t worship our history like they do in Florence or Rome or Venice. What fascinates us is the future,” he said. He issued an imperative, too: “Time you got a better grasp of Italy,” he said. Given that his daughter—my wife—comes from Milanese stock, I felt some urgency about undertaking that task.

I begin by seeking out some of the “invisible hands” that make Milan a center of fashion, design, and general good taste. I find a tailor who dresses presidents and hand him the sport jacket off my back so I can watch him work his magic while I listen to how he mastered his craft. I seek out an Iranian-born rug merchant who’s creating a museum to the great textiles of the world. His shop is a museum in itself. Wandering among ancient Persian prayer rugs and Berber tribal carpets, I can actually touch Milan’s past as the proprietor recounts how the city’s “cultured warlords” began importing such treasures back when Milan’s wealth still rested on its ability to control the mountain passes through the nearby Alps.

The generosity of spirit I encounter at each stop unlocks Milan’s heart. I suddenly see that the “bustle and ostentation” that once put me off are functions of a “devotion to the craft of living” that effortlessly blends the old and new. I see it in the city’s “intimate little house museums” and in its repurposed churches and steel mills. I even see it on the rooftop of the city’s dramatic Duomo, the white-marble Gothic cathedral at its center. High above the streets, the city’s cobblers, bakers, and cartwrights are all celebrated here in statues of saints, each one funded by a separate guild. I realize suddenly that the spiritual and the entrepreneurial are not rivals in Milan; they’re one.

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