For about ten years now, Milan changes visibly in front of the eyes of its inhabitants, filling up with minimalist and basically hipster places that would not seem out of place in Berlin, San Francisco or Copenhagen.
It is a uniformity that is a symptom of what we call gentrificationborrowing a word introduced in the 1960s to describe the geographical and social transformation of a working-class London neighborhood after the arrival of the middle class: the renewal of historically popular parts of cities (as in Milan had been the Isola district or the area of via Paolo Sarpi) which leads to a redevelopment of services and properties, but also to an increase in rental prices, which pushes away the original inhabitants.
Between a pokéria and a contemporary art gallery, between a supermarket that only has organic products and the new headquarters of a startup specializing in gourmet salads, however, the recent vestiges of a more humble and simple, more sincere Milan resist. Which is what they tell every day, with an Instagram page that collects over 56 thousand followers and with a book recently published for Il Saggiatoretwo young people who have decided to remain anonymous, but who animate Posti Sinceri.
Tobacconists and bars with démodée signs, snack bars with plastic chairs and tablestaverns that boast founding dates of over fifty years ago, bocciofile and circoletti that have marked the daily life of residents for decades: from 2018, Posti Sinceri has been collecting places deeply rooted in the urban fabric of Milan: “We have always been attracted to these places and their aesthetics, and we were amazed that they were little known and little frequented , especially by young people – the founders of the Instagram page told us – They are places that we all have under our house, but which are not very visible or unattractive from the outside. We wanted to show them in a new light, without imagining how successful we would be ”.
What the project was born on Instagram is no coincidence: “It made sense at the beginning because the aesthetic factor was predominant and the project was mainly photographic – they told us again – We have always used it in a somewhat atypical way, but despite its limitations it allowed us to reach a wide audience who, to our surprise, managed to understand our idea even only from the photos and from Stories in which we never speak. The book we have just published has allowed us to exit from social networks and to tell everything about our work, demonstrating that this is a project that can detach itself from the social element, because it uses it as a tool and not as an end “.
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The first post published on Posti Sinceri was dedicated to the bowling alley in via Ajraghi, with the large potted plants, the walls of a welcoming yellow, the red umbrellas with the Algida logo a little faded from years of sun. As the archive grew, A map accessible to everyone on Google Maps was also createdwhich today collects 90 different places and has been viewed over 1.2 million times: “Since we started to have a wider following, we have received suggestions that more often than not have led us to some beautiful discoveries – they told us the founders – For us it is one of the greatest satisfactionsand we are happy that people write to us even when they are traveling or on vacation and find honest places around the world ”.
If at the beginning the idea was only to map the realities that they found interesting, the project soon acquired a further dimension: “Today, at least for us, Posto Sinceri is a political projecthighlights and exhorts to choose an alternative to the prevailing idea in our city based on appearance, on a consumerist idea of meeting places and sociality – The homologation and gentrification of neighborhoods in Milan risk making these places disappear to the detriment of chains, franchises and trendy clubs that have nothing to say about the identity and history of the city and its inhabitants. We reject the Milan modelthat is, a city that is essentially based on work and consumption and which also reduces the aggregative life to a product and not to a moment to live. “
Again: “Thinking about it, it was almost natural that this project was born in Milan as the apotheosis city of this model”. However, this does not mean that the Lombard capital is the only Italian city in the throes of gentrification: also in Rome, Turin, Florence, Bologna and Naples there are those who have begun to raise the issue. “We would love it if the political reading of our project were replicated in other cities”, the founders of Posti Sinceri told us: in other countries, such as to Buenos Aires or Madridsimilar pages have sprung up in recent years.