City, I Listen to Your Heart – Milan

“We left Ponte Sesto because we wanted to end our excursion in the cemetery extension designed by Rossi. We cautiously removed a loose lock on a closed door and sneaked into the beautiful turquoise octagonal chapel—a sort of holy trespassing. In this cemetery we found the best grave design we had ever encountered: a glass vitrine containing a photo of a sports car, a gun, and a bottle of liqueur. Pieve Emanuele looks like a village designed by the gentle hand of Canella for a new generation of young pioneers: housing blocks whose size rival Berlin’s Karl-Marx-Allee, a futuristic sport center, and a church which looks like a spaceship ready for take-off.

Still in Pieve Emanuele, a plexiglass box containing a Bianchi race bike mounted on a pole captured our attention. A sign revealed an ambitious project: a small garden dedicated to the famous cyclist Fausto Coppi complete with an altar holding images of his triumphs. Today the whole complex lies abandoned and full of trashed furniture. The project’s initiator, the former major of this little town, was dismissed during the political turmoil which plagued Italy back in the 1990s. To be clear, Coppi had nothing to do with Pieve Emanuele, while it seems evident that the whole country had something to do with Coppi.”—Giovanni Piovene