An ensemble comedy in which Milan becomes a luxurious existential ambition

While candidates in the centre-left primaries emerge like contenders for the Iron Throne, and forgotten youths demonstrate or smash shop windows in the city centre, there is a Milan that lives entrenched in its towers, above all political demands or connection to reality. This is the city portrayed by Michela Proietti in her debut novel Di passaggio a Milano (Solferino), an ensemble comedy in which Milan is an existential ambition.

Archibald and Patricia McDougals, a ‘DINK’ (double income, no kids) couple, move into a luxury block of flats. Patricia, née Crawshaw, is an elderly English noblewoman, raised between London and the Cotswolds, schooled in the art of entertaining and observing good manners, and a scathing columnist for a British newspaper. She follows her husband Archie to Milan; they married against her family’s wishes. He has made his way up the social ladder from the lower middle class to become a visiting professor at Bocconi, complete with a private wine cellar at his London club. Also living in the block are Monica and Guido Curtis, whose Fantozzian surname betrays their status as nouveau riche. Ever since university, the couple have turned every step and sacrifice into a strategy to attain a status within which they now move with ease. The large flat in the skyscraper (though not in CityLife, where the footballers live), the twins and the dog with haughty names, the villa in Forte dei Marmi. However, it is rented—a sign of precarious wealth not built on solid family assets: it would not take much for it all to crumble. Joining this duo is Caterina, a twenty-year-old from Salento, the granddaughter of a countess’s servants, who arrives in Milan—like everyone else—to break free from provincial life and finds herself running an OnlyFans account (Caterina goes to the city, with a touch of Euphoria).

The context from “La vie mode d’emploi” intertwines with another coveted, ruthless arena: The Mansion club, to which Pat seeks admission at all costs, hoping that an international couple might add an exotic touch to the guest list, and of which Monica is queen, while she dreams of a lifetime membership, which her husband Guido—in trouble due to the arrival of the English professor and seeking to compensate for his own naivety as a social climber—buys her for one hundred thousand euros.

In short, Di passaggio a Milano is a human comedy of gossip and barbs, such as the burraco carnage between the McDougals and the Curtises, and even, at times, genuine feelings buried in unexpected places, such as the friendship between Pat and the elderly Evelina. Above all, it is a comedy about Milan, where ‘it doesn’t matter where you come from, but how you reinvent yourself’. Proietti ironically portrays a city where social mobility is still possible for those willing to invest the effort—provided they allow themselves to be swallowed up and transformed—and where the neighbourhood one lives in defines identity. Yet Milan is multifaceted, and alongside privilege and the urban aristocracy, one glimpses a city—no less caricatured, yet more approachable—of creatives who share lofts in NoLo and drink craft beers in the ‘tactical squares’. Seemingly more relaxed, yet still contrived and glossy. In the gallery of characters—ranging from wealthy women who revere beige and flaunt ‘quiet luxury’, to the slimy and violent pimp, to those obsessed with reputation as if they were Karenin, to the gay man who takes refuge in marriage—everyone wears a mask that sooner or later slips. Each character confronts their own trials and secrets; the tension is skilfully built up until it explodes into disaster and more or less dissolves into a sort of happy ending for high society, complete with a charitable twist from the noblewoman. Yet in this Milan, the suburbs and the hinterland do not exist – places where people are rarely just passing through.