Milan

Milan is the urban counterpoint to the mountains in Pietro’s family history: a place of work, family life, and formative opportunity, but also of noise, distance, and a persistent sense of not belonging. The city offers his parents new roles and gives Pietro an education and a starting point for adult independence; later, its apartment streets and buried river become the backdrop against which he measures both his parents’ lives and his own departures.

Setting and family life

In the 1970s, Pietro’s family lived on the seventh floor of an apartment building overlooking a broad avenue. The road was said to cover the course of the Olona river, and rain sometimes flooded it; to the child at the window, the imagined river beneath the asphalt seemed as forceful as the traffic flowing above it. Cars, scooters, lorries, buses, and ambulances filled the avenue, while two ranks of identical buildings amplified the noise. On some nights Giovanni Guasti could no longer tolerate the sound. He would open the window, look down at the city, put on his coat, and go out walking.

The apartment also set the family’s urban surroundings against remembered rural life. Through the windows there was a broad expanse of sky, described as uniformly white and detached from the seasons. On the small balcony, blackened by exhaust and stained by rain, Pietro’s mother kept flowers. While tending them, she told him about the countryside where she had grown up: August vineyards, tobacco drying in a kiln, and asparagus that had to be found and cut before it broke through the soil. The balcony could not reproduce that landscape, but it became a place where her memories of it entered the household.

Work and the city’s demands

Milan gave Pietro’s mother a new professional role. After working as a nurse in Veneto, she became a health worker in the Elms district, in the city’s western outskirts. Her position had recently been established alongside a new family clinic, where she supported women during pregnancy and monitored newborn children through their first year. She liked the work, though the district’s name suggested a greener place than the twelve-story housing blocks and social problems she encountered there.

Her responsibilities included assessing the conditions in which children were being raised. In the most serious cases, she had to refer families to the juvenile court, a decision that brought her anguish as well as insults and threats. She nevertheless remained convinced that she had acted correctly. Social workers, educators, and teachers shared a sense of collective responsibility for the children. Her work thus placed her in a network of cooperation that contrasted with the isolation Pietro associated with his father.

Giovanni worked as a chemist in a factory with a workforce of ten thousand, where strikes and layoffs were recurring features. He often returned home angry. At supper he watched the news in silence, reacting bitterly to reports of murder, political crises, rising oil prices, and bombings. When colleagues visited, political discussion commonly ended in argument. The factory and the city’s news entered the apartment as pressure and conflict, while the family’s view from the seventh floor offered no escape from the traffic below.

Education, departure, and distance

Milan was also the place from which Pietro’s parents tried to shape Bruno’s future. They proposed taking Bruno into their home in September and enrolling him in a technical or professional institute, according to his preference. The arrangement would begin as a trial year: he could return to Grana the following summer if he was unhappy, or stay through graduation if it worked out. The proposal offered him both a home and the freedom to decide what to do with his life afterward. Pietro, hearing Bruno recount the plan, expected Luigi Guglielmina to refuse; the evidence establishes the offer and Pietro’s expectation, not the eventual outcome.

Pietro’s own adulthood carried forward the family’s pattern of leaving one place to develop elsewhere. At twenty-three, after military service, he left Milan for Turin to join a girlfriend. The relationship ended, but he stayed attached to Turin, where its rivers and arcade cafes made him feel at home. His move also widened the distance from Giovanni. After Pietro abandoned university studies, the two argued over his future and did not speak for a year. A hundred and twenty kilometers of rice fields lay between them, but the separation depended less on the distance than on neither man choosing to close it.

His connection with his mother took a different form. Because Pietro rarely spoke on the phone, she wrote letters, and he answered by telling her about his life in Turin. He shared his decision to attend film school and his interest in documentary work; she encouraged his vocation, and for years sent him money while he sent her short films of people and places. Milan remained part of this relationship even when he lived elsewhere: it was his mother’s home and the point of correspondence and family connection, rather than the place where he intended to build his adult career.

Return, memory, and renewed departure

After Giovanni’s death, Pietro returned to the old family apartment in Milan. There, the familiar kitchen preserved traces of both parents’ lives, including the map Giovanni had marked over two decades with routes through the mountains. The map had become a dense record of excursions rather than a legible guide. By comparing its colored lines with a glacier trip the three men had taken together, Pietro understood that black represented his father, red himself, and green Bruno. Milan therefore held an unexpected record of journeys elsewhere: on a wall in the city, the map disclosed that Giovanni had continued to walk in the mountains with Bruno as well as alone.

Years later, Pietro again used his mother’s Milan apartment during a period of transition. He gave up the Turin apartment where he had lived for ten years, moved boxes to his mother’s place, and spent more than a month there while pursuing funding for documentaries about the Himalayas. The city’s heat, traffic, and imagined river beneath the avenue felt disconnected from any sense of home. From the motorway, Monte Rosa appeared above the haze as he transported his belongings between apartments, a distant mountain presence in an otherwise urban passage.

In 2010, Milan greeted him amid economic crisis. The airport seemed almost decommissioned, while the high-fashion shops were empty; at the same time, cranes and building sites suggested a construction boom. Friends in film, advertising, and television had lost work as companies went bankrupt, and many depended on occasional jobs or help from retired parents. Pietro had already secured a ticket to leave, and a few days later took coaches toward the mountains. Milan was again a point of departure, though changes on the route into Grana—such as a phone mast and a cement dam—showed that leaving the city did not mean returning to an untouched world.

At Christmas, Milan briefly became a place of snow and anxious attention. Snow fell even on the avenue of Pietro’s childhood, where cars moved cautiously and children played outside. He was due to fly back to Kathmandu, but his thoughts were on Bruno, whom he believed to be in the mountains. The next day he bought snow chains on the motorway and snowshoes in the valley, then left the traffic of Milan and Turin behind for the road to Grana. Across these returns, Milan remains both a lived-in family home and a threshold: its apartment windows preserve memory, while its roads and transport links repeatedly carry Pietro away from it.