Nations drown, towers collapse, chaos reigns 

        of languages and colors, traumas and new loves, 

        enters Bovisasca, sweeps away the twentieth century 

        of masterful solitude, of our verse 

        suspended in the void. Other women wander 

        among the market scraps, in the new misery 

        of this moment. I sit in the café below my house, 

        I look at the landscape that belonged to Sironi, on a lonely 

        August 12th, I begin to summon the shadows. 

        I see my father again in a seaside town, a breeze 

        of the Belle Époque and a lost boy's smile. 

        And then Paoletta, who found victory on the tatami 

        three seconds before the end. And Roberta 

        who dedicated her life. And Giovanna, 

        in the silence of hospitals, when time 

        reveals its great paradigms. 

        "The dark loves that left 

        a thorn in the middle of the years will return alive, 

        they will return, they will return luminous."

We begin the interview with a poem from Tema dell'addio (Mondadori, 2005), written years ago, during the period when Milo De Angelis lived in Via Bovisasca, which is the most extreme edge, almost a territory unto itself, compared to what is commonly understood as “Bovisa,” where the poet has lived for several years. It must be said that Milan is a layered universe of lived memories for a poet who has lived in different areas of the city, from Viale Majno, where he was born in 1951, to Corso Lodi, Via Varesina, and finally Bovisa.

As can be gleaned from the account of the neighborhood by the poet Maurizio Cucchi, who lived in Bovisa during his childhood in the 1950s, the area included a more residential zone immediately north of Viale Jenner, crossed by the axis of Via degli Imbriani. Coincidentally, at different times, that area was home to both Cucchi and De Angelis (and for the latter, it still is) . De Angelis lived in Bovisa at various times in his life, first for cinematic explorations—De Angelis' passion for cinema is legendary, having seen films in practically every theater in Milan, many of which have now disappeared—then for a period staying in Via Bovisasca and finally settling in Via degli Imbriani.

© Un ponte tra più città Laboratorio di Progettazione Partecipata nel Quartiere Isola (MI)

Milo De Angelis, let's start with your earliest memories of the neighborhood. The suburban landscape is a very important element in your poetry. Let's start with your personal experiences, your first walks as a teenage flâneur towards Bovisa...

To get to Bovisa, where a dear classmate of mine lived when I was in middle school, I took a tram that crossed Milan from south to north, from Piazza Tirana to Piazza Bausan. It was tram number 8, with its old 1930s carriages and wooden seats, or rather a single seat that ran from front to back, where sometimes you had to squeeze in to find a place, without forgetting the obligation to give up your seat to an elderly person, an obligation to be respected at all costs: your honor was at stake, not to mention the reproach of everyone present! The border between two worlds was Piazzale Lugano, where the 90/91 trolleybus passed (and still passes today), already famous at the time for a certain liveliness that distinguished it and for all kinds of thefts and muggings: ‘el bus de’ làder', as Franco Loi said. The 90/91 ring road represented a physical and spiritual frontier. Once you crossed that line, you entered the arcane worlds of the suburbs, where a thousand things unknown to a naive young boy could happen. For example, it could happen—and it did happen in 1964—that you could see a film by Luigi Comencini, La ragazza di Bube, which I absolutely did not want to miss after reading Cassola's novel, and which I greatly appreciated, with a luminous and beautiful Claudia Cardinale. On the other hand, among the suburban cinemas, the Perla enjoyed a well-deserved reputation, it was almost considered an arthouse cinema, and there I had the opportunity to discover important films such as Visconti's Il gattopardo, Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, and even one of Ingmar Bergman's first films, Monica and Desire, in 1967. You can imagine my excitement when I learned, many years later, that the poet and friend Maurizio Cucchi had lived in the Perla cinema building!

However, your first film seen at the cinema was—as you said in an interview—Rocco and His Brothers, some scenes of which were shot in Bovisa, if I'm not mistaken. You saw it at the Cinema Duse in Via Varé.

That's right, some memorable scenes from Rocco and His Brothers are set in Bovisa, such as Simone's assault on Nadia under the Ghisolfa Bridge and the fight between the two brothers. And then, in the early 20th century, Bovisa was home to many factories linked to the entertainment industry, which made it the first rudimentary Italian Cinecittà, in addition to the Fabbrica della Scala, which was alive and operating until a few years ago in Via Baldinucci.

As for the Duse cinema, I recounted in my book of interviews La parola data (The Given Word) – where I often talk about Milan – that this cinema is the only one that escaped my firm decision as a child to get to know every single cinema in the city, without exception, of which there were more than 130 at the time: Abadan, Abanella, Abanera, ABC Abel, Abruzzi, Adriano, Alcione, and so on... I still know the list by heart today. Well, I actually saw them all, except for the damn Duse, where for one reason or another I couldn't get in. Once, when I had decided to see To Kill a Mockingbird in 1966, I came down with the flu; another time, in 1960, my dad, mom, brother, and I had planned to go out together to see Monicelli's The Great War, but then my father took out the map and said, inflexibly, “No, it's too far.”

And finally, in 1961, I had decided to see Rocco and His Brothers again, which I had already admired at the Eolo cinema in Via Mac Mahon, but I was urgently summoned by a classmate for a soccer game. In short, everything conspired against my meeting with the Duse: and today I look with a touch of melancholy at the beautiful building at Via Varé 23, where the theater was located until it closed permanently in 1985.

You often mentioned the landscapes painted by Sironi: did your actual encounter with Bovisa correspond to that imagery, to the painter's feelings? Or did you already have other interpretations or cultural associations in mind regarding Bovisa?

Bovisa brings together different eras. It began as a farming community, as the reference to oxen in its name suggests; then it became industrial, with the most important chemical hub in the country and futurist paintings depicting a swarm of geometric houses; finally, it took on a student and ultra-modern tone with its aerospace laboratories. Each of these epochal changes left traces that still remain today: from the Albana farmstead to the gasometers and industrial ruins to the graffiti and murals scattered around Via Enrico Cosenz and the surrounding area, evidence of a persistent pictorial and photographic presence, from Sironi to Guaitamacchi, from Ermanno Olmi – Il ragazzo della Bovisa (The Boy from Bovisa) – to Gabriele Basilico, Chiaramonte, and the many artists who have decided to live in this neighborhood. To all these I would add the football artist Osvaldo Bagnoli, also a son of Bovisa. Yes, as you rightly guessed, when I chose to stay here, I knew I would be immersed in a veritable assembly of centuries and I was very happy to live in the intertwining of various modern styles.

Was there a difference between Bovisasca and Bovisa during those youthful years of your explorations in Milan, between the 1960s and 1970s? Cucchi says that in his day, in the 1950s, Bovisasca had a negative reputation socially.

I too thought there was a derogatory connotation in the name ‘Bovisasca’, as if it were a ‘bad’ Bovisa, embodying the worst of the neighborhood. And indeed, once you cross the threshold of Piazza Alfieri, it feels like entering another world: the shops disappear—so dense in Via Mercantini, Via Varé, Via Candiani, and Via Andreoli—and everything takes on a rough, essential, even gloomy tone, if I think of the wall that reaches Via Cosenz, as if the city had suddenly emptied and only its streets remained. I lived for six years at 85 Via Bovisasca, and I remember that for even the smallest thing, you had to leave the house and take the car or the 92 trolleybus to the Central Station: there was no newsstand, no bar, no restaurant, there was nothing; and especially in the evening, you had the vague, war-like impression of a curfew. Then things improved, with that blessed place called ‘Spirit de Milan’, to which every Milanese must wish a very long life, and the darkness of Via Bovisasca found some light. But in the meantime, I had already moved house and moved with Viviana and my cat Luna to Via degli Imbriani 31, which in comparison seems like a whirlwind of people and energy. How many things I have discovered over the years! From the colorful Nihilo with its fresh fruit and vegetables, to the historic stationery shop crowded with students, to the flower shops that brighten up the street, to the Libraccio and the Library in Via Baldinucci, to the perfumes of Lillo and Bomboniera and, above all, those of Naxos, a little further on, a magnificent fish restaurant where I set a poem, to the many initiatives of the Scighera and that highly cultured shoemaker in Via Varé who quoted Carlo Porta's verses from memory, while at any time of day you can hear the cheerful clatter of tram number 2, the one that goes to the Navigli.

Finally, I would like to ask you for your thoughts on the conservation project concerning “il Bosco della Goccia” (the Goccia Forest) and whether it is a place you associate with those years in Bovisasca, which borders it. Incidentally, the forest and the abandoned industrial structure feature in Sulla punta di una matita (On the Tip of a Pencil), the documentary about your Milan filmed by Viviana Nicodemo.

I read the pages you sent me on the Goccia and I completely agree with the author, Ivan Carozzi, who paints a magnificent portrait of this place, lyrical and poignant, dramatic and fairy-tale-like, ancient and contemporary, like certain scenes from Tarkovsky, who is rightly mentioned. In some ways, the meaning and destiny of La Goccia reminds me of that of the Montagnetta di San Siro, where historical memories and absolute archetypes intermingle. Both are parallel worlds, full of mystery and silence, memory and fierce relevance. The idea of populating the Goccia with sculptures brings me even closer to this project of safeguarding and reviving a place that is both real and magical, the product of great history and the short history of each of us.