Raffaele Cantone, the president of the anti-corruption authority, upon receiving the "seal" of the city from the hands of mayor Pisapia, reciprocated by returning to Milan the title of "moral capital" of Italy, with reference to Expo, administrative correctness and the spirit of collaboration between institutions. All very important things but which alone would not justify the recovery of such a title were it not for the disastrous situation in Rome.
The myth of the "moral capital", in fact, - incidentally, "the only serious ideological myth, not rhetorically fictitious, of the Italian bourgeoisie", according to Vittorio Spinazzola - did not refer at all to mere administrative correctness, taken for granted, but to a more general municipal pride of the Ambrosian community, made of good governance, of course, but above all of work ethic and entrepreneurial bourgeois individualism. Values, these, witnessed by the great Universal Exhibition of 1881, with which Milan presented itself as the driving force of the nascent Italian industry and with which, according to historians, the myth of the "moral capital" was born. Myth destined to break, then, not against the rocks of "tangentopoli", but much earlier, against the repressive and protectionist policies of the Italian governments at the end of the century.
In any case, it is certainly worth returning to the theme, if only to underline the political importance of the choice of the new mayor of Milan, starting precisely from Expo which, in a certain sense, functioned like the Universal Exposition of 1881. As then, in fact, this great "Fiera", in the noble sense that this word has always had in Milan, it has allowed the city to become aware of itself, what it is and can become, how it sees the world and how it is seen by the rest of the world, what it can do and what its role is in Italy and in the globalized economy. In a word, you helped her become aware of her new metropolitan reality and of the Italian capital of the economy of culture.
Milan, as we know, has also undergone profound transformations in the past. From '45 to '60 there was the "reconstruction", which saw it reconfirm its role as the industrial and economic capital of the country. Then there was the great productive “restructuring” of the 70s and 80s, which made it the capital of services and the advanced tertiary sector. Finally, there has been this latest transformation, which began in the 90s and is still ongoing, which is making it one of the global capitals of knowledge. Something more than a simple transformation, therefore, but a real metamorphosis, also made possible by the metropolitan dimension. In fact, in the case of knowledge workers, as Giuseppe Berta underlines in his "La via del Nord", the true corporate structure is constituted precisely by the metropolitan form. The city is their professional point of reference. It is the city that acts as the engine of development. It is in the "metropolitan melting pot", especially if innervated with adequate technological networks and equipment, that opportunities are generalized and spread with unparalleled effectiveness on the part of any business organisation.
This poses two very important problems for Milanese politics, understood as a logic of government and not simply as "correct" administration, which is only its prerequisite. The first is to guarantee all the inhabitants of the metropolitan area what Saskia Sassen calls the “right to the city”, ie the extension and intensification of that "urban quality" over the entire metropolitan area which is one of the fundamental factors in the development of the contemporary economy. Quality made up of rapid connections, efficient and accessible services, a clean environment, urban order, architectural beauty, sociability, culture and work. The second is to imagine and build in the coming years, with flexibility and a practical spirit, a government system suitable for this reality, which breaks with the top-down and closed logic of our administrative system, to lay the foundations of a pluralist system, in in which the representative dimension is less relevant than that of solving problems and in which collaboration between subjects of various kinds occupies a preponderant place.
If Milan really wants to deserve the title of "moral capital" of Italy, in the original sense of the term, it is this that must be dealt with and the figure of the new mayor must emerge at this level. The rest are just illusory shortcuts.
