The school
From via Bezzi we decide to go towards Loreto, to go window shopping and to get closer to the university. We deserve some rest after the visit to the geriatric institute. We stay on the beltway. Why should we try to get lost when somebody planned a street that takes you exactly where you need? If i hadn’t followed this thought we wouldn’t have passed in viale Liguria for a long time probably. Right after the subway stop of Romolo, where all the students of the IULM get off, we notice a dark old building, with no windows and weeds growing on the walls. Our lunch can wait. We look for a parking lot, we go on for few hundred meters and decide we went to far, so we try to go back. This has perhaps disorientated us and we stop right in front of an old building with all the windows walled up. Is it the one we saw before? It does look different. The façade is completely closed, there is not one chink left open: the concrete on windows and doors leaves no possibility to imagine what there could be inside. It’s a massive block. Fortunately there’s always the same shattered gate: what sense does it have to wall up everything if you leave the main entrance weakly protected? The gate is partly off its hinges, very rusty, and it’s held together by the famous chain for bicycles covered with the consumed green plastic. Why are these chains always green? The sign on the gate says: “access denied to motor vehicles not authorized”. So in theory i could go in... i’m not a vehicle! But i’d have to climb up the gate, cause the space to pass through is too tight, maybe a kid would be able to pass. I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to climb a gate on a main street with my beautiful velvet coat anyway. We look at the courtyard from the gate. There are hints of people passing in it. Trash is all over. Nature is completely wild: the plants have overgrown and it seems they are dancing capturing whatever happens to find itsels between their claws. One of their victims is a excavator: if the plants had the strenght to catch such a big vehicle (probably authorized), what would it happen to my skinny body? From the split we see on our immediate right a door, part of the external wall. It’s open! There’s a sign on it which ironically says “close the door”. How is it possible that we didn’t notice an open door to get in? So we walk back few steps, we pull our heads out towards the door... and there’s nothing there! No, wait! Behind climbing plants we can see there was a door, that has been walled up like the rest. We feel a bit perplexed, cause before we noticed from outside the walled door, we saw inside the open door. We laugh about it and we go towards Piazza Belfanti, where i saw an open gate: we must find out if it’s part of the area. I take few steps inside, very timidly: it’s a kind of deposit of junk and old stuff. There’s a guy sitting on a chair staring at us. We go back out cause i verified that the two areas are not the same one: there’s a high wall between them. Going back to the car we pass near the gate again and Alessandro invites me to check out the symbol on it: it looks like the symbol of peace with a S on it. It could be the symbol of the industry that made the gate, but it’s too big, so probably it represents what there was here before.
