Milan is the city where Casaubon’s intellectual life and the making of the Plan take shape: a place divided between student politics and academic study, but joined by the bars, offices, and private rooms in which he meets Jacopo Belbo and works with him and Diotallevi. The city’s university and Pilade’s Bar first bring together revolutionary argument and cultivated distance; later, its publishing world and domestic spaces become settings for the Plan’s growth and Belbo’s isolation.

University and divided intellectual life

During his student years, Casaubon experienced the University of Milan as a place of accommodation between competing worlds. While students elsewhere in Italy occupied classrooms and demanded that professors teach proletarian sciences, Milan’s university maintained what he describes as a territorial compromise. Political activism occupied the grounds, auditorium, and main halls; traditional academic culture withdrew to the inner corridors and upper floors, continuing its work apart from the public tumult.

That spatial division suited Casaubon. He could debate proletarian questions downstairs in the morning and pursue what he regarded as aristocratic knowledge upstairs in the afternoon, without feeling a contradiction. He believed an egalitarian society was approaching, yet also thought its trains would need to run reliably and that someone had to learn the practical work of operating them. He likened his position to that of a future planner watching the Bolsheviks while pursuing his own education. Milan thus gives his early political ambivalence a physical form: parallel institutions and arguments coexist within one university, allowing him to participate in both without choosing between them.

Pilade’s Bar and the city’s social crossroads

Milan’s canalside Pilade’s Bar is where Casaubon first meets Belbo, in 1972, while researching the Templars for his thesis. The bar stands near one of the city’s navigli and has a zinc counter and billiard table. Its everyday clientele includes tram drivers and artisans, who stop in the morning for white wine; its later-night company includes publishers, an architect, a crime reporter, Brera Academy painters, writers, and students.

The bar’s importance grows out of its capacity to hold unlike groups together. In 1968 and the years that followed, Movement activists could play cards beside a reporter from a newspaper associated with the establishment. The reporter could regard himself as a worker trapped in an ideological production line, while the students accepted his presence. Pilade’s is neither a political headquarters nor an academic institution; it is a social crossing where each group can temporarily inhabit the other’s company.

Even the changing drinks register the bar’s shifting intellectual and political atmosphere. Pilade continued to stock white wine for tram drivers and more traditional customers, while serving sparkling wine to intellectuals and Johnnie Walker to revolutionaries. Casaubon later imagines that the political history of those years could be traced through the progression from Red Label to twelve-year-old Ballantine and then single malt. Milan’s public life is rendered not only through slogans and occupations but through the small rituals of a shared bar.

Work, absence, and the Plan

In the later action, Milan is the base from which Casaubon tries to understand Belbo’s disappearance and the consequences of the Plan. When Casaubon returns to the city, Diotallevi is still in hospital and Gudrun reports that his condition has not improved; Casaubon cannot bring himself to visit. Belbo is away, said to have left for family reasons, but has taken both Abulafia, his word processor, and the printer. The absence of Belbo, Lia, and the baby leaves Casaubon feeling displaced within a city that had previously supplied his work and companionship.

Casaubon goes to the office, where Gudrun says she has been left to keep the business running, then takes the keys and heads to Belbo’s apartment. The rooms show the extent of Belbo’s withdrawal into work: papers and books crowd the space, the computer and printer sit with boxes of disks, and the kitchen and study bear signs of prolonged neglect. These details make the apartment a private counterpart to Milan’s busy public and professional world. Belbo has not merely left the office; he has carried its work into his home and shut himself inside it.

The city’s publishing offices also become part of the circumstances leading to Belbo’s later actions. Aglie’s influence at Garamond’s firm expands until he is involved in recruiting authors and advising on decisions. Belbo is relieved that Aglie spends more time at the office and less time near Lorenza, whose appearances still affect him. In Milan, professional arrangements and private attachments are not separate plotlines: the publishing business offers Aglie a route to influence, while Belbo’s emotional responses shape how he tolerates that influence.

Confrontation and the city’s wider consequences

Milan is also where Belbo tries to provoke Aglie by revealing what he presents as the secret behind the Plan. He tells Aglie that Colonel Ardenti had left Garamond Press a deliberately misleading text and that Belbo still holds a slim file of ten pages containing the authentic material. He then recounts the Plan as the three men had devised it, including the claim that the police detective De Angelis had come close to the truth but met Belbo’s silence. Belbo’s calculated withholding of the supposed final secret is intended to make the rest seem credible to someone already disposed to believe in a hidden tradition.

Afterward, Belbo returns to Milan and shuts himself in his apartment with food and the television on. A news report about a bomb on an Intercity train between Bologna and Florence connects his private return to a larger atmosphere of political fear. A passenger has left a suitcase on the train after saying it will be collected in Florence; suspicion prompts a warning, the train is stopped in the mountains, and the bomb squad finds a timed explosive capable of killing dozens. The episode does not make Milan the site of the train incident, but places Belbo’s Milan evening within the public anxieties of the period.

Across these episodes, Milan is more than a backdrop. The university’s split between activism and traditional scholarship anticipates Casaubon’s own ability to move between competing intellectual worlds. Pilade’s makes such coexistence social and ordinary, while the publishing offices and apartments show how the same city’s professional networks and private absences can foster the Plan’s development and Belbo’s isolation. The city holds these worlds together without resolving their contradictions.