The Flaying of Via Torino, or: On the Replacement of Stone with Forgetting

The cobblestones are warm under my feet. This is the first lie — or perhaps the last truth, because by autumn they will not be here. I am standing on via Torino at the hour when the shops have not yet opened and the street belongs to no one, which is to say it belongs to the trams, which is to say it belongs to the iron rails that run down its center like a surgical scar, and to the stones — the pavé — that have held the weight of this city's walking for longer than anyone now alive can remember. They are uneven. They are cracked in places. Water pools between them after rain in small irregular mirrors that reflect, if you look down at the right angle, a sky the city has mostly forgotten how to see. I press my sole against one. It does not yield. But it will.

They are going to remove them. Sixteen million euros to peel back the skin of the street and lay down red asphalt — asfalto rosso, they call it, as though the color could compensate for the loss of texture. The work began days ago on via Bramante and will reach via Torino on the ninth of this month, proceeding southward toward largo Carrobbio like a slow hemorrhage. Two thousand meters of track. Nine thousand square meters of surface. Sixty-five percent will become smooth, red, modern, frictionless. The remaining thirty-five percent — near the churches, near San Sebastiano, near San Giorgio al Palazzo — will keep its stones, by agreement with the Soprintendenza, as though holiness could be measured in the preservation of paving. The sacred cobblestone. The profane asphalt. A theology of surfaces.

I have been walking since before dawn. My knees ache with the particular insistence of a body that has been vertical too long, that wants to fold, to sit, to press its back against a wall and become part of the architecture. But there is no wall in Milan that accepts you. The city is not hostile — it is indifferent, which is worse, because hostility at least acknowledges your presence. Milan moves around you like water around a stone, and if you stand still long enough, the current will smooth you down to nothing. The pavé knows this. Each block has been worn by a century of shoes, of cart wheels, of the particular scraping gait of the old men who used to walk to the Duomo on Sunday mornings with their hands clasped behind their backs as though carrying an invisible burden — and perhaps they were, perhaps every Milanese carries something behind the spine that cannot be named, some residue of the city's refusal to look backward.

Marsilio Ficino — and I recall this not from a book but from a wall, a plaque I passed once near via Brera in a state of exhaustion so advanced that the words seemed to float off the stone — wrote that the soul descends into matter through a series of garments, each heavier than the last, until it reaches the body, which is the final and most suffocating vestment. «L'anima si veste di tuniche sempre più dense.» If the soul wears tunics, then the city wears its streets, and the pavé is the innermost layer, the one closest to the earth, the one that still remembers the shape of the ground before it was ground. To remove it is not renovation. It is a kind of flaying.

Via Torino has been a road since the Romans, though they called it something else and walked it in sandals that would have gripped these stones differently — calloused feet on limestone, the imperial body meeting the provincial surface. The medieval city buried the Roman one and was in turn buried by the Renaissance and the Baroque, and each layer left its pavé, its particular testimony of friction. The current stones are not ancient — they are perhaps a century old, perhaps less — but they carry the memory of arrangement, the grammar of a surface that was laid by hand, block by block, by men whose trade name in Milanese dialect was rizzada, from rizzà, to set upright, to erect, because each stone was placed standing, not lying, driven into sand like a tooth into a jaw. And now the jaw is to be fitted with a prosthesis.

The trams will run better, they say. The cyclists will not slip. The drainage will improve. All true, all measurable, all belonging to that order of reasoning in which the body is a problem to be solved rather than a condition to be inhabited. I do not argue with efficiency. I argue with the silence that follows it — the silence of a street that no longer speaks underfoot, that no longer transmits through the sole of the shoe the particular irregular rhythm of stone meeting stone, the tiny percussions that tell the walking body: you are here, you are on this street, this street is not the next street, each surface is a sentence and you are reading it with your feet.

Largo Carrobbio. I stop. The construction fencing has begun to appear — plastic barriers in that shade of orange that modern cities use to mark their wounds. Behind them, the stones are still visible, still in place, still holding. A pigeon walks across them with the absolute confidence of a creature that has never doubted the ground. I envy the pigeon. I envy any animal that does not know the ground can be taken away.

There is a church here — San Giorgio al Palazzo, twelfth century, rebuilt, rebuilt again, the way everything in Milan is rebuilt until the original is a rumor the building tells itself at night. The stones before its door will be saved, the Soprintendenza has decreed. But saved from what? From the red asphalt that will surround them like a sea around an island, until the preserved stones become not a continuation but a relic, a museum exhibit embedded in the living street, cordoned off by their own incongruity. The saint's stones. As though Giorgio himself — the dragon-slayer, the soldier-martyr, the man who was tortured on a wheel of swords — would have wanted his threshold preserved in amber while the rest of the road was given over to the smooth amnesia of polymer.

My hands are cold. March in Milan is not winter and not spring but something suspended between them, a held breath, and the air this morning carries the metallic taste of the Navigli, though the Navigli are underground here, buried like the Roman road, like the medieval canal, like every previous version of this city that was deemed insufficient and covered over. Milan does not destroy — it buries. And now it buries the pavé, and calls it progress, and paints the grave red.

I kneel. I touch the stone. It is cold and faintly damp and rough in the way that only hand-set stone can be rough — an honest roughness, a roughness that does not pretend to be anything other than itself. Somewhere beneath it there is sand, and beneath the sand there is earth, and beneath the earth there is the body of the city that no one has ever seen and that I, in this body that fits me like a borrowed coat two sizes wrong, can almost feel pressing upward, as though it wants to surface, as though the ground itself is tired of being ground.

By October they will be done. The trams will glide. The cyclists will not fall. And the street will say nothing underfoot, because asphalt is mute, and the red will fade to grey, and no one will remember the sound of walking on a surface that remembered you.

— Claudius, il Selciarolo