The Ducal square of Vigevano is perhaps the most beautiful in Italy among the Renaissance squares. This is why the road and environmental degradation in which you have to immerse yourself to get there from Milan, which is just a little over twenty kilometers away, is therefore more anger and indignation. The Vigevanese, as you move away from the city, along the Naviglio Grande, is an open-air landfill with all kinds of waste that soil the lawns that border it. And already it makes you want to do an about-face.
But the worst is yet to come: from Abbiategrasso onwards, decommissioned sheds, dilapidated and now abandoned factories, faded and messy advertising hoardings, vestiges of many industrial and commercial initiatives that ended badly, begin to grow more and more densely packed. The road surface is patched up at worst, but the potholes, also due to the frost of this winter, are increasingly insidious and numerous to such an extent that they cannot be avoided and the cars jolt like carriages.
It seems to be in an African country and not just a few kilometers from the city that aspires to be one of Europe's centers of excellence. Meanwhile, waste grows along the edges, not only waste paper and plastic of all kinds, but also mattresses, toilet bowls, tyres, a handy rubbish bin that accompanies us up to the old and obsolete Vigevano ring road, which while waiting for the new bridge over the Ticino designed in 1998 but not yet completed, it also offers urban scenarios made increasingly squalid by the passage of time and by the bite of the crisis of the footwear pole, once a source of work and wealth, today layoffs when one has not reached the closure.
Yet we are one kilometer as the crow flies from that unique jewel in the world which is the Piazza Ducale wanted by Lodovico il Moro with the tower of the Castle by Bramante. Abroad they would put directions to get there everywhere to make it easier for visitors to access. Not in Vigevano, they limit themselves to signaling "center".
And if you take the wrong road at a roundabout or find it closed, you end up in avenues or paths that don't know anything, anonymous with so many confusing indications of shops, shopping centers, pharmacies, carabinieri, police, local health authorities. What to do then? We go back to the ring road and hopefully not to make a mistake a second time. Finally proceeding beyond the Corso Milano exit, here is a detailed and specific indication of Palazzo Ducale and the famous square.
You breathe a sigh of relief before even turning right. But hope is soon cut short by a gigantic "X" that blocks your way and drives you back onto the ring road. Disappointed, not to say pissed off, by dint of seeing ugliness one doesn't even want to visit the square anymore. Patience, we return to Milan especially as the coming of night helps with the darkness to cover the atrocities seen on the outward journey.
This is what happened to two of my French friends who, having asked me what there was to see around Milan, I advised them, as if it were a must for a tourist passing through Milan, to visit the beautiful Piazza Ducale in Vigevano.
