Ernest Hemingway arrived in Milan in June of 1918 and remained there until September, when he had recovered enough from his injuries sustained on the Piave front in July to get back on his feet. In the interim, he fell in love with an English nurse; drank two, three, eight glasses of Cinzano beneath the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele; watched the shop shutters come down; and began sketching out the first pages of A Farewell to Arms. From the hospital, he described Milan in a letter to his mother as “a peach of a town. It’s about the most modern and lively city in Europe.” Years later, he would also remember the 18 martinis he drank in front of Piazza della Scala.
And Hemingway was far from the only writer to see the magic in Milan. Below is a selection of books that set their stories in the city, all to be discovered (or rediscovered) before it takes center stage at Vogue World: Milano on September 22.
A Love Affair by Dino Buzzati
In A Love Affair (1963), Dino Buzzati tells the story of architect Antonio Dorigo’s obsession with Laide, a young prostitute barely out of adolescence whom he meets in a brothel. It is a love affair built on waiting, jealousy, and pursuit, and Milan becomes the setting for his fixation. Antonio crosses it from one end to the other to reach Laide, wait for her, imagine her, and convince himself that she truly loves him—not simply for the money he gives her at every encounter.
Milan’s streets, buildings, and squares acquire meaning only because they seem to hold the promise of an encounter with Laide—and, little by little, they become so intertwined with the idea of Laide that it is impossible to tell whether Antonio is in love with her or with the place his love has made him see. As Buzzati writes: “Everything in all the inanimate world that fascinates us… were charged with meaning for us because, without our suspecting it, they held a foregleam of love.”
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms (1929) is a story of love and war—or, perhaps, of the impossibility of truly telling the story of either one. The title plays on the double meaning of the word “arms,” which can refer both to weapons and to embraces: a farewell to the front, but also a farewell to love.
The novel drew on Hemingway’s experience on the Italian front in 1918 and, above all, on his convalescence in a Milan hospital, where he fell in love with an English nurse. It was here that the story of Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley took shape, against the backdrop of a Milan caught up in the First World War.
