A line of several dozen people, well masked and well distanced, wait in the rain for the door to open Galleries of Italy in Milan. They are adults, teenagers and some children who have moved from the comfort of their homes, despite everything, to visit the exhibition of about seventy photographs entitled "But we will rebuild." These are images of the city bombed in August 1943, taken from the Publifoto Intesa Sanpaolo archive. A lot of people for a small exhibition, contained entirely in one room, curated by Mario Calabresi, and accompanied by color photographs taken last spring by Daniel Ratti; therefore you can see glimpses of Milan as they were in August 1943 and as they were a few months ago.
Some photographs are classic and well known: the interior of the Scala theater in ruins, the skeleton of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II against the sky, the piles of ruins on which the spire of the Duomo with the Madonnina stands out. Other less known tell the daily life of the Milanese afflicted by the war: the cart that replaces the tram because the tracks are uprooted, lunch or dinner outside, on the side of the road, around a makeshift table, because the house is destroyed and August in Lombardy reserves an acceptable temperature.
It's no wonder that the line lengthens as the minutes go by, that everyone moves forward a few meters in peaceful silence, that the disciplined wait repays curiosity, interest and commitment. Milan, and other cities to be sure, doesn't just offer the deplorable nocturnal gatherings of people huddled together drinking and embracing or those during the day to protest about almost everything and against almost everyone. On the contrary, the need to nourish the spirit with theatre, music, the figurative arts, which is very much alive, is all too mortified both by a perennially protesting and complaining propaganda, and by public authorities, the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and local institutions, which they continue to consider culture a playful factor and not an economic factor.
In the oppressive climate of the pandemic you can see everything: there are mourners who, after a funeral in church where the seats are correctly spaced, go out and embrace and kiss in the churchyard as if Covid 19 had never existed (and perhaps the deceased or the deceased just missed cause of the virus); there are the schoolchildren who, at the cost of bribing their muscles, sit for hours and hours in the school desk, without complaining they give up their playtime in the courtyard; there are the rude (or exhausted?) nurses who in hospitals, instead of disciplining the patients, wave their arms and scream without result and, indeed, end up unleashing small fights.
It's not even surprising that a series of old black and white photographs arouse a lot of interest: the theme of reconstruction is fresh and alive in the minds of the most aware Italians, capable of looking at the pandemic with a far-reaching gaze, with a practical spirit and without rhetoric. Those who visit the exhibition are comforted by the observation that it can be reconstructed, you can start again even from the most gigantic ruins. The Second World War was a huge catastrophe, but the current pandemic also required a lot of mourning, suffering and sacrifices.
If anything, the speed of the Milanese reconstruction of three quarters of a century ago is surprising, those eleven months to rebuild the Scala and inaugurate it with the unforgettable concert on May 11, 1946 conducted by Arturo Toscanini. The provident care taken to protect the works of art is astonishing, the Last Supper enclosed between wooden planks and sandbags, the Napoleon in the Brera courtyard encapsulated in solid armor and, miraculously immune from blows, the statue of Alessandro Manzoni in a square San Fedele destroyed.
In the current political and social climate, if anything, it is surprising that the mayor of the Liberation, Antonio Greppi, said then, surrounded by the rubble: «But we will rebuild everything with patience». Today anyone would say: "Let's wait for the money, then we'll see". He is amazed that there was no need for hundreds of forms, signed, countersigned, stamped, delivered to the appropriate offices while waiting for an always too late go-ahead.
In the particular autumn situation of 2020, where the Lombard administrators are not even able to buy a few anti-flu vaccines, it is not possible to forget how in 1945 the councilor for welfare of the Municipality of Milan, Elena Dreher, set out for the cities without blue cars, with few public transport circulating, to look for penicillin for sick children and which, in the end, would find the money of generous donors to obtain the drugs.
Is it ever possible that the soundtrack of our pandemic is sung daily to protest, lament, invective and very little instead to patience and discipline, to looking ahead? To prick up your ears the other music can also be heard, that of the patient crowd under the umbrella, who seeks wisdom and encouragement in the images of the past to carry the weight of difficult moments on their shoulders, confident that "we will rebuild" not only the buildings but also a slightly more solid morality.
