[Vwoolf] "you should see the Milan gardens"

[Stuart N. Clarke]

- says Rezia out loud.  And so we should – especially now.

It is understandable that Rezia should compare Regent’s Park with the Milan gardens, and sneer at the ‘people here, huddled up in Bath chairs, looking at a few ugly flowers stuck in pots!’  But if Woolf had herself never seen the Milan gardens, would she have made the comparison? 

The old station in Milan was in the Piazza della Repubblica, where there are now only trams. Adjacent to the Piazza is the Via Manin, and in the Via Manin is the Hotel Manin from where Woolf wrote to Madge Vaughan in May 1909 (L1 393).  A nineteenth-century hotel, it was unfortunately totally destroyed in an air raid on 13 August 1943, and the new hotel, while expensive, looks dull.



Opposite the Hotel Manin is the east side of the Giardini Publici.  They were begun when Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, owned Milan.  ‘In 1856–1862 architect Giuseppe Balzarett[i] designed the enlargement of the west side of the Gardens based on the English landscape park model with artificial hills, ro[c]ks, and lakes. These works were concluded after the Unification of Italy.’  There are a number of notable buildings, such as the Palazzo Dugnani, which belonged to the family that owned the area in the eighteenth century, and the Natural History Museum.



So there is an irony: the gardens are kind of English, while Regent’s Park is, after all, mainly park rather than gardens.  Anyway, it is undeniable that Woolf visited the gardens.  



However, the gardens are now called the Giardini Indro Montenelli (1909-2001) after this ‘popular journalist and writer, who was known to relax in the park every morning before entering the nearby offices of his newspaper, Il Giornale.  Montanelli was also shot in the legs by the terrorist group Brigate Rosse on June 2, 1977; his statue has been placed close to the spot where this happened’.  Below is my photo of the statue.







“In June 2020, a statue of Indro Montanelli in Milan was vandalised by activists, in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement. It was painted red and tagged with the words ‘racist, rapist’. This was done to highlight what protesters considered a forgotten chapter of Montanelli's past, and voice anger that a statue was erected to him in light of this after his death in 2001. At the age of 26 year old, when he was in Italian Ethiopia (former Abyssinia), he bought a 12 year old female child, that he married and in different interviews he called her 'a small animal'.” (Wikipedia)  



And see:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-53042350



Stuart 

(Day 94)





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