Keywords

Many public places in our cities, such as cafés, restaurants, dairies, theatre foyers, wine bars, brothels, bookshops, discos, art galleries, street corners and squares, have been historic and ritual points of reference for artists communities. Such environments whose particular “atmospheres” have created ideal places where these authors have met, known, admired, fought, and enjoyed themselves.

Places in which they may also have shared fundamental moments as well as artistic and design intuitions.

For different eras, yesterday as today, we pinpoint historical maps of the various cities with all the design studios together with the residences of the artists and architects themselves. If we draw the lines connecting these points, folding them along the different streets and squares these personalities might encountered, we then have created an intricate network of paths full of exciting twists and turns. It is easy to discover that some of these intersections correspond to public places where these personalities, more or less consciously, shared their lives, their passions and at the same time their projects and artistic researches. Some of these places have become legendary for particular eras, especially in Milan, such as: Bar Craja, Biffi café in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II and Biffi in Baracca Plaza, Bar Grillo, Savini restaurant, Gambrinus brewery, Tumbun in San Marco, Bar Blu, Bar Oreste, the brothel in Fiori Chiari Street, Bar Giamaica, the Moscatelli wine shop, Trattoria Moriggi, the Martini terrace, Camparino or Bar Zucca in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, the dairy in via San Marco, Scofone brewery, Plastic discotheque and Bulloni wineshop. To name just a few of the first and most famous names that come to mind, not to mention art galleries and bookshops.

The story of the so-called literary cafés is often picked up on in the city and sometimes national cultural histories. However, we still need to fully understand what these public places’ lives consist of. They are not austere, isolated libraries or even exclusive clubs, but rather commonplaces of entertainment, often for large groups, and sometimes even the most unlikely social and cultural entanglements: a true cross-section of city life.

An interesting commentary on the cultural and artistic life in these public places and on the streets of Milan between the 1920s and 1930s is the one left by the architectural historian Giulia Veronesi. The author recalls the authoritative figure of Edoardo Persico, who has been a refined intellectual, art critic, graphic designer and the victorious provisional architecture’s author as well as a fundamental theorist of Italian rationalist architecture between the two wars. Persico once stated:

“However, he spoke no solely on the pages of magazines and newspapers, not solely in lecture halls; and he spoke not solely in his tiny editorial office in Via San Vittore, which had become a landing place for non-Milanese and even non-Italian friends passing through and a meeting place for some of the liveliest artists that Milan had to offer: poets and critics, architects and painters, sculptors and ceramists, typographers and decorators. He did not only talk in the smoke of the cafés, from Mokador to Craja, from Donini to Biffi in Piazzale Baracca, or in the rare homes of friends where he sometimes liked to stay in the evenings. He often spoke in the dark nocturnal silence of the Milanese asphalt, beaten only by his footsteps, cadenced with those of a listen-pal friend, whose soul he seemed to shake with his passion, with his violence, with the interrogative cry of doubts that continually surfaced in his spirit and in which he pondered, dialectically merging with enlightened reasons, his secret faith and strength” [1].

But this vision of Persico as an assiduous visitor of cafes where he exchanged opinions with other friends, artists and intellectuals, is also reported by Carlo Belli, musician, critic, painter and theorist of abstractionism: “And frequently, over a table in that Caffeuccio on the corner of Via Brera and Via Fiori Oscuri, almost opposite to the Milione, a meeting place always crowded with our artists, the two of us would exchange notes on pieces of paper with graphic projects we had been working on during the week” [2].

In the chapter Tutti al Craja (Everyone at Craja) in his memoir Il volto del secolo (The Face of the Century), Carlo Belli provides a rich and interesting insight into his visits to the famous Bar Craja, designed in 1929 by Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini together with Luciano Baldessari and with the collaboration of artists Lucio Fontana, Fausto Melotti and Marcello Nizzoli. The quote is long, but it is rare to find such an engaging description of the atmosphere created in a specific place, so it deserves to be read in its almost full length. The author wrote:

“In the meantime, in Milan, architects Figini and Pollini, teamed up for the occasion with architect Luciano Baldessari, because they obtained their first important commission: no less than a bar in the centre of the city! The bar was located in Piazza P. Ferrari square, also accessed from vicolo MargheritaFootnote 1. The new bar was called Bar Craja and immediately became the evening meeting place for all modern artists. It can be said that it was the first truly rational building to be built in Milan, and the locals, after looking at it with scepticism for some time, finally accepted it as a fait accompli. During the first few months, however, except for the rest of us, the place did not welcome anyone, so much so that we feared it would have to close. Instead, the owner, brave to the last, resisted and won. The Craja continued to be open for many years until it was demolished for dubious speculation! A true sacrilege” [2].

At this point, Belli begins with a very detailed description of all the materials used and all the parts that constituted the refined rational design. Then he resumed his immersion in the lived environment described as follow:

“The overall tone due to the diaphragms slant and the arrangement of the forms was a high one, but I repeat, sometimes, on entering, one was struck by a sense of hostility. We wanted it just like that, for our polemical reasons, but many of us became convinced that we should look for warmer solutions once the controversy was over. Anyway, we were the ones who warmed up the place. Around nine o’clock in the evening, we arrived one after the other (I came from Brescia) and settled down on the black leather sofas. Our place was over there in the third compartment, by the Melotti fountain. The first to arrive were usually the painters Oreste Bogliardi, Mauro Reggiani and Umberto Lilloni. […] Later, those who had eaten at the Pesce d’Oro [restaurant] arrived: Peppino Ghiringhelli, pale, bewildered and sweet, always on the point of emerging from a fairy tale, followed by his brother Gino, who was the best among us in terms of culture, maturity of spirit and strength of character, together with Maria Cernuschi, a girl of dazzling intuition, lovely and a great entertainer, who later become his wife. The master printer Modiano also came from Verziere, sometimes accompanied by Leonardo Sinisgalli, mathematician and poet, while it is never known from which cardinal point the sculptors Lucio Fontana and Carlo Conte would have come; the former, light-hearted, angry, paradoxical, who rediscovered the world of knowledge on his own, immediately giving it wild and hilarious interpretations; the latter, shy, taciturn and always hungry, complained about the injustices of the world (he was a very good sculptor) that did not care about the things he was creating.

Atanasio Soldati sat very pale and hieratic at a table next to me, almost aside. He waited for me, he always kept a seat for me, because we were very close friends; just as Melotti and Fontana, Persico and Del Bon, and, I think, Lilloni and De Amicis were very close friends at that time: […] Sometimes, late in the day, the architects would then come: Pollini, distinguished and reserved, Figini enfent ultraréchauffé of the company, enthusiastic, translucent, with a spiritual charge that was always extremely powerful. Occasionally, on Saturday evenings, Terragni, the painter’s Rho and Radice, the architect Lingeri and the very young Cattaneo, who died before reaching his peak, would come down from Como. The young master printers Dradi and Rossi, valiant militiamen of Il Milione, joined this group of people from Como, who then published, at their own expense, i.e. in desperate and heroic conditions, their own frail publication to stimulate a new trend in the art of typography, which was called Campo Grafico. […] Around half-past eleven, it was fully completed. Great discussions, of course. Sometimes Carrà would come, and we would welcome him as a master; other evenings Arturo Martini would break-in, and then we would listen to him because he was always talking big, […] He was always shouting, yelling, and screaming in such a way as to give the impression that there were little space for him on this earth; […] How many evenings we spent at Craja! […] At Craja, we breathed the air we had asked for. There, we harboured the illusion of changing the country, infusing it with a spirit as lively and deep as the one we breathed in other European countries; there, we engaged in collective discussions on the state of things that could then be perceived as present and future” [2].

Compared to such a rich quotation as Belli’s for Bar Craja, unfortunately, there is nothing similar to describe the cultural crossroads that probably enlivened Bottiglieria Bulloni in Piazzale Aquileia in Milan. In the same wine shop since 1933 (the year of the V Triennale and the first Milanese edition), a large tile panel painted by the futurist artist Enrico PrampoliniFootnote 2, dedicated to the festive lovers of white and red wine, stands out behind the counter. On the right side of this panel are two abstract-cubist compositions in the form of luminous devices, also depicted and conceived by Prampolini himself. It is easy to imagine frequent evening gatherings, organised to enjoy a good glass of wine or a Campari (to whose history this restaurant is also linked). This place involved some of the emerging architects of the rationalist movement who worked and lived nearby in those years. In the 1930s, opposite the wine bar, there were the Villa and the Milanese residence of the Usuelli family (owners of the famous Borsalino hat factory in Alessandria), wherein 1938 Ignazio Gardella had designed the flat of “Nino” Teresio UsuelliFootnote 3, who was the nephew of Teresio Borsalino and the author of the great relaunch of the brand from 1939 when he took over as Chairman until 1979. Also nearby, since 1931, Franco Albini and Giancarlo Palanti had shared a studio in Via Panizza 4 (at that time, Albini lived nearby in Via D’Alessandri). Close by was the studio of Gio Ponti and the editorial office of his magazine Domus, which in those years were located in the Borletti building, designed by Ponti and Lancia in 1927, at the end of Via San Vittore 42, just opposite to Corso di Porta Vercellina and few steps from Piazzale Aquileia. Lastly, we discover that not far from the Bulloni wineshop, nearby Via Verga 5, Marco Zanuso lived there with his family in pre-war years. In 1933 he was still in high school, but in the late 1930s he was a passionate student of architecture.Footnote 4

Several years later, at the end of the 1970s the Bulloni wineshop experienced a new revival with the assiduous frequentation of Pierluigi Cerri in particular, together with numerous collaborators and friends, graphic designers, photographers, artists and art directors. This revival happened when Studio Gregotti Associati moved into the beautiful former brickworks of the historical Candiani company, which was a building magnificently renovated by the studio itself, located in via Bandello 20 next to the elegant Candiani family home. The architect Luigi Broggi designed the building at the end of the 19th century.

After the Second World War, the Brera district of Milan experienced a period of great artistic vitality, and among the various meeting places, the Bar Jamaica became the favourite place of many artists. Especially those artists of the younger generation, partly because ‘Mamma Lina’ gave easy credit to many of these penniless artists of the time.

This story is now very well known and celebrated, thanks also to some great photographers, such as Ugo Mulas, Alfa Castaldi and Mario Dondero. These photographers frequented it in its golden years and immortalised that “atmosphere” and many regular visitors, who would later become famous, like the photographers themselves. The regular visitors included Roberto Crippa, Gianni Dova, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Nanda Vigo, Luciano Bianciardi, Salvatore Quasimodo, Enrico Baj, Allen Ginsberg, Dino Buzzati, Valerio Adami, Camilla Cederna, Bruno Cassinari, Ennio Morlotti and Nanni Balestrini.

“The walls of Jamaica, then as now, immediately caught the eye. Covered in white tiles, they evoked home kitchens or even, if you wanted, sinful “houses” nearby, until 1958 located in Fiori Chiari and San Carpoforo streets. In the bar, voices chased each other and overlapped, mixing learned disputes about art, painting, literature and journalism (…) with the improper words of the broomstick players who handled the few tables available in the already small place” [3].

The painter and intellectual of the highest rank, Emilio Tadini, has left us a precious testimony of what the world of the Bar Giamaica was like in the 1950s and 1960s, and he begins to talk about it starting with the exemplary case of the photographer Ugo Mulas. Emilio Tadini reported:

“I met Ugo Mulas in the early 1950s at a poets’ convention in an art gallery in Via Borgogna. Because Ugo wanted to be a poet, and naturally he never had any money, so one day Pietrino Bianchi said to him: ‘Why don’t you take some photographs of me for my weekly magazine?’ and Ugo said yes. Then he borrowed a camera and, incredibly, out of the blue, took a series of splendid photographs of Montale’s Liguria and realised that he liked being a photographer. So he became the great master of contemporary photography that everyone knows still today”.

Why have I told this story? To give an example of what Bar Jamaica was then and describe how coincidence and destiny were part of that small Olympus of minor gods. I think we were all sure that these personalities supervised that magical place and its inhabitants (I use the word “inhabitants” because many of us spent more time in the club than at home).

There were many photographers in Bar Jamaica, as much as painters, writers, filmmakers and journalists, or rather, they were a lot of young people who wanted to do one of these jobs - and who managed to do it, and in many cases very well. Of course, one mustn’t forget the help that each of them received sooner or later, from that poor, highly efficient Olympian who moved in mid-air from the garden within Bar Jamaica - always overflowing with people and smoke in the very long evenings, until late at night.

Sometimes I remember when we were drinking white wine at the tables - from half past noon to two o’clock, or towards evening and after dinner - and someone would take out his camera and shoot a few photographs outdoors, if the weather was fine, or, if the weather was bad or too cold, in the background of the white tiles.

And perhaps, in those moments, each one of us photographed, without even thinking about it and certainly without wanting to, was posing for some future story that didn’t matter at all whether it came true or not. Because it must have already seemed to us to have been realised them in the dream world, lazily figured in our heads, and perhaps we already thought we could see them sketched out as best we could, on the table, near the glasses.

Almost all of those photographers have become great, famous. But for anyone who is born and bred in Bar Jamaica, those are still the best photographs. - The ones where four or five young people, very young, were sitting either outside on the garden’s iron chairs or inside against a backdrop of white tiles - that invisible, these, and yet, to look closely, hazily mirrored in their pupils and perhaps even portrayed as cheap enigmas of the pauses of their inconsistent pride, all too vulnerable…

Almost needless to say, the minor gods of Jamaica’s Olympus were still keeping watch. And their representatives on earth quietly and inconspicuously continued to keep themselves busy – at the floor level, let’s say. Mrs Lina, Elio…’” [4].

Another important testimony of how many clubs and public places in Milan were marked at that time by a new image, which stimulated their creative and artistic frequentation, is that of the famous artist Lucio Fontana. In an interview in 1962Footnote 5 [5], Fontana answered the provocative statement “People say that your art is difficult to understand” replyning “On the contrary, it is very easy. It is the art of the man in the street. Don’t you see the furnishings of the most modern cinemas, bars and public places? They are all my ideas: the cuts, the holes (do you know the ceiling of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan?), replace the ovals, the cherubs, the sirens, the rose windows of the past” [5].

In this quick historical reconstruction of that invisible network of places representing the focal points where some particular creative “atmospheres” of the Milanese artistic and design world have been condensed over the decades, we conclude this synthetic journey with the most recent case. We then move from bars to discotheques: the famous Plastic discotheque in Viale Umbria 120.

Plastic was created in December 1980 from an idea of Lucio Nisi, the owner, and Nicola Guiducci, creative and DJ (who had previously worked as a salesman in Elio Fiorucci’s showroom). The club has become internationally known thanks to the frequent visits of personalities and artists such as Madonna, Elton John, Andy Warhol, Freddie Mercury, Prince, Paul Young, Stefano Gabbana, Maurizio Cattelan, Francesco Vezzoli, Bruce Springsteen and Keith Haring, who used to fly from New York with Grace Jones to spend an evening there [6].

The American artist Keith Haring was undoubtedly one of the most famous and emblematic Plastic visitors in the mid-1980s, and Marco Belpoliti described that moment with these lines:

“Milan, June 1984. After working until two o’clock in the morning in a continuous and unstoppable way, Keith Haring leaves the spaces of Salvatore Ala’s gallery and runs to Plastic, a fashionable disco, where Nicola Guiducci, the friend who puts music on the plates and makes him feel as if he were in New York, is waiting for him. They all cuddle him, the artist who paints on the plastic covers of trucks or sheets of paper, covering clay pots and reproductions of classical sculptures with graffiti. As he will tell years later, Ala goes with him to the disco and then runs away: time, during the day, was dedicated to the market and at night was just for himself. An equal division, in which the night feeds the morning, and vice versa. Keith reappears the day after, in the afternoon, following massive doses of sex and drugs” [7].

Years later, in an interview, Elio Fiorucci recalled: “DJs? They should no longer be called that, but sound designers. Today the variety of sounds is incredible, and they can switch from one reality to another. The Plastic disco? I have always been a fan of Nicola Guiducci and Lucio. It was the first community that anticipated the Internet. A magical place. I used to take Warhol and Haring there”Footnote 6 [8].

In light of what has been said so far, it is essential to consider, within the framework of a historical places’ reconstruction of the city’s artistic and design “faber”, the memories of these places as inseparable parts of the urban context’s creative and productive activity. Thus, these unique places and their associated memories and atmospheres deserve to be remembered with appropriate and contemporary narrative systems that can show and revive the network of physical and intellectual relations that have woven the spirit of the “Faber” between art and design the time.