Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

From 4 April new exhibition dedicated to the history of Milan, download from the site www.comune.milano.it/milanodaleggere - The poster of the initiative

Milan, 4 April 2022 – "Milan to read" starts again today for its seventh edition, the initiative created by the Libraries of the Municipality of Milan to promote reading by offering a selection of digital books downloadable for free from the site www.comune.milano.it/milanodaleggere.

This year the exhibition finds its focus in History and will offer a novel a month to travel through time, among the events that have passed through our city over the centuries, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century.

The Viscontis and the Sforzas, the years of the plague of Manzoni's memory, Milan, capital of the Napoleonic Kingdom and the Five Days, the Belle époque, Futurism, the Great War and the epilogue of the Fascist Era in ten historical novels to download for free from the web or via QR code.

Once again the ten titles will be available thanks to the participation of authors and publishers who have given their works free of charge. The download will also be possible from posters and screens around the city and, thanks to ATM, which confirms itself as the technical partner of the initiative, "Milan to read" will also be distributed on the metro and surface transport networks.

Despite substantial continuity with the past, the 2022 edition marks an important innovation: the works will be released approximately a month apart from each other, so as to give greater scope to the campaign and the time to dedicate to reading. After the first release on Monday 4 April, the ebooks will in fact be published every three weeks and each ebook will remain available for 30 days, "passing the baton" to the next, in a reading relay that will accompany us until December.

Let's then get on this "time machine" to relive the past eras of our city, savor its atmosphere, learn about its mentality, habits and customs.

The age of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the years of the Duchy of Milan, first of the Viscontis and then of the Sforzas, are represented in the novels of Cristina Fantini ("Nel nome della pietra", Piemme 2020), Daniela Piazza ("The temple of light", Rizzoli 2012) and Daniela Pizzagalli ("The lady from Milan. Life and passions of Bianca Maria Visconti", BUR 2009). The first two novels revolve around one of the greatest undertakings that our history remembers: the construction of the Cathedral, from the birth of the Veneranda Fabbrica on the impulse of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, who saw the cathedral as a symbol of his own greatness, to the construction site still in progress ferment about sixty years later, when Filippo Maria Visconti died leaving the Duchy without heirs and power passed to the Sforza. The third novel is a historical biography, which inserts the strong personality of the last Visconti heir, Bianca Maria, wife of Francesco Sforza, in a faithful reconstruction of Renaissance Milan.

With "Miserere" by Marina Marazza (Solferino 2020) we take a time leap into the years of Spanish domination and the plague raging in the city. Against the backdrop of a Milan with a Manzonian flavour, the novel sets the events of the daughter of the forbidden relationship between Virginia de Leyva, the Nun of Monza, and Giovan Paolo Osio.

One more leap and Milan is the capital of the short-lived Kingdom of Italy, Napoleon the king. "The Riviera di Milano" by Tito Livraghi (Meravigli 2015) tells of its miseries and splendors: the Scala, the living rooms of the nobles and, in Crescenzago, the Naviglio Martesana, with its beautiful riviera, but also the poverty and expedition of the young Lombards with Napoleon's troops in the hell of the Russian campaign.

After the Restoration, Milan returned under Austrian domination, against which it rose up in 1848. The barricades of the Five Days echo in the novels "Open fire" by Luciano Bianciardi (published in the collection "The bad prophet", Il Saggiatore 2018) and " A romantic story" by Antonio Scurati (Bompiani 2007). If the latter reconstructs the story starting from 1885, with the flashback technique, and inserts the love story between Aspasia, muse of the insurrection, and the aristocratic patriot Jacopo, Bianciardi superimposes the Risorgimento era on current events of the Sixties, in a mix of past and present, historical and contemporary characters, which earned the novel the title of "uchronic".

A few decades later, the Belle époque marked a period of peace and relative prosperity. These are the years in which the story narrated by "Il velocifero" by Luigi Santucci (Mondadori 2018) unfolds: a family saga which, with tasty inserts in dialect, unfolds between the center of Milan and the countryside that began just beyond Corso Lodi, in a story between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to the tragedy of the First World War.

The Great War is the underlying theme of Gianni Biondillo's novel, "Come sull'alberle lefogli" (Guanda 2016), which tells it through the eyes of a group of young avant-garde artists and intellectuals who graduated from the Brera Academy. Seduced by Futurism, convinced interventionists, they supported and fought that war, even at the cost of their lives.

From war to war, with "Notti e nebbie" by Carlo Castellaneta (Interlinea 2018) we immerse ourselves in 1944-45: Milan is occupied by the Nazis, governed by the fascists of the Italian Social Republic and the Resistance grows stronger every day. The novel narrates this tragic period with the voice of a political police chief who had chosen the regime. 

"Il velocifero" will open "Milan to read", followed by "Come sull'Alberi le Foglie", proposed respectively on 4 and 27 April, to continue according to a calendar of releases that will be announced on the site www.comune.milano.it/milanodaleggere.

We thank the Pinacoteca di Brera for authorizing the use of the image of Alessandro Manzoni from the portrait by Francesco Hayez.