Rimadesio and Platform magazine proudly present #ILoveMilano, the latest episode in the “Talking About” meeting series. The event focuses on the city of Milan and its stories, presented exclusively by 10 Milanese design and architecture professionals. An all-female event, whose guests accompany us on an evocative journey through an intimate, inclusive and multifaceted Milan. A Milan both hidden and transparent, transformational and mysterious. Culture, community, and liveability, but also the emotions and stories of a city that looks to the future and always opens its doors to transformation.
Thinking of a city as if it were one’s own home is, first and foremost, an exercise in civilized behaviour. But, above all, it is a way to feel part of a community. The feeling of belonging to a place and a culture has something atavistic, instinctive and necessary about it. The smells, sounds, food, language or local dialect are all elements that form part of the baggage of emotional memory that each of us carries within us and which allows us to identify with a wider community, outside of our own family nucleus. Speed, the ease of moving from one place to another, the ability to connect, globalisation: today, these aspects have redrawn the boundaries of the modern world.
We still have our roots, which to some extent answers the philosophical question of ‘where do we come from?’; but the mobility that characterises the modern world has created a sort of highly-developed and transversal professional nomadism. Starting with our schooldays and then colouring our first professional experiences abroad. Then, inevitably, comes the time for us to settle somewhere. And often our workplace will not be where we started out in life. It is not easy to feel at home in a city that is alien to our emotional memory and, sometimes, it is the city itself that does nothing to facilitate the integration process. It is usually a question of give and take, on both sides.