Word: milan
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EACH opening night during the opera season, Milan's Via Manzoni is transformed from a bustling commercial street to a river of wealth and elegance. Bumper to bumper, a seemingly endless line of Mercedes, Alfa Romeos, Lancias and Maseratis inches toward the Piazza della Scala, their high-powered engines being raced by traffic-frustrated drivers. Pulling up before La Scala's neoclassic facade, the cars discharge their cargoes-usually an Italian businessman, resplendent in white tie, and his bejeweled wife, dressed in a Fontana, Capucci or Dior...
...Milan's opulence is no sudden sparkle or passing phenomenon. The city is the dynamic fountainhead of the biggest, most sustained comeback that any European nation has made from World War II ashes. Germany has had its economic miracle, and France its postwar resurgence; both are still prospering but at a slightly slower pace. North Italy has sustained its boom. In Milan the Gothic finials of the renowned duomo now have to fight for recognition against a skyline of striking new skyscrapers. From the Piazza del Duomo rises the bedlam that only Italian traffic can generate. In front...
...only the businessmen prosper, Milan's workers are the industrial elite of Italy. Per capita earnings have leaped 56% since 1952 to $1,000 a year, which in actual purchasing power amounts to much more. Milan's 1,500,000 people pay 26% of the taxes-and grumble as if it were 100%. And all over North Italy-the flaring top quarter of the boot that lies above Florence-workers can now own the refrigerators and television sets they produce. Last year so many of them traded their motor scooters for autos that car registrations in Italy soared...
Italian industrial production, still largely concentrated in the "iron triangle" of Milan, Turin and Genoa, has doubled in the past eight years. So avidly does the rest of the world gobble up Italian products that the nation's balance-of-payments surplus is the envy of the U.S. Treasury. Buoyed by these achievements, North Italian businessmen, who once argued that they could hold their home markets only with the help of protectionism, today swagger forth on a Common Market invasion of the rest of Europe with all the self-assurance of the Caesars...
...opera at Milan's La Scala last week was Verdi's Battle of Legnano, and the principals bore glittering reputations -Soprano Antonietta Stella, Tenor Franco Corelli. But as anxious to please as either of them were the two men posted on either side of the first gallery (the fifth tier). Antonio Carrara, 33, and Carmelo Alabisio, 76, can lay claim to being opera's most successful dispensers of professional applause...