For the past few days, Milan has been under a cloud of hazy, smoggy, downright unhealthy air.
This is not, I am learning, unusual. Air quality here is notoriously bad, and it mostly doesn’t phase the locals; every time I mention it to someone, they shrug and say, “Yeah, get used to it.”
For me, it’s still rather jarring. Air quality—the metric you can find lurking in your weather app, falling somewhere on that blue-green-yellow-red-purple spectrum—is not something I really ever thought much about. Living in the Northeast for my entire life, air quality was mostly never a problem. Only in recent years did the hangover of faraway wildfire smoke start to make noticeable-but-brief impacts on any of the places I lived. Still, it was an anomaly—a curiosity more than anything else.
In Milan, it’s a different story. I’ve been here about a month, and there have been several stretches of haze that prompted me to check in daily with the weather app. Usually, I zoom out on the air-quality map to find a good swatch of Northern Italy besieged by a dark red blob of poor air, while the rest of the continent shines a healthy green or (even better) blue.
There are prosaic reasons for this. Basically, it’s because Milan is located in a big valley in Northern Italy that produces quite a bit of industrial air pollution that gets trapped by surrounding mountains, forcing the smog to linger over cities like Milan.
These air quality woes got me thinking about something else: The tendency of travel influencers and writers to rank Milan as a sub-par destination in Italy.
You may have seen me ranting on Instagram recently about a Wall Street Journal article that featured Milan, but said the city “lacks the breathtaking beauty” of Rome, Florence or Venice. 🙄 Look, I get it: I lived in Venice, too. It’s absolutely stunning and magical. But does it have to be a beauty contest?
Anyway, I felt a little defensive about my very-newly-adopted home. Milan is GREAT! It’s got the stunning old architecture of any Italian city worth its salt, a lively queer scene, a close proximity to the mountains, and the modern amenities of a global metropolis.
And yet, it seems that few outsiders (especially tourists) appreciate Milan. I can partially see why: Milan doesn’t have as much “sight-seeing” as other Italian destinations, for sure. But maybe that’s exactly what makes it a great place to live. Unless you go to the Piazza del Duomo, the city isn’t mobbed with tourists like many other Italian hotspots.
Still, the combination of the bad air days and bad online reviews has me feeling a little insecure about my choice to live in Milan, especially when I see major cities like Rome or Naples luxuriating in the big green expanse of good air quality. It seems almost unfair: Milan is a hub of transit and walking and biking, and we’re the ones suffering with smog???
Alas, we are. It’s something I’ll need to get used to. But this situation also reminded me of a phrase I learned from an Italian professor back in college: “aria fritta.” This translates literally to “fried air,” but means something closer to “hot air.” As in, “That politician’s speech was a bunch of hot air.”
Aria fritta is the phrase I find myself reaching for whenever I read Instagram posts that rate Milan as a low-tier Italian city. The travel-influencer-industrial-complex flattens entire places and cultures in an effort to give bite-sized recommendations.
I’ve certainly engaged with this type of facile travel advice. Who hasn’t? But it’s a different feeling to be on the receiving end, to live in a place that the internet discards as not beautiful enough.
Some days, when the smog is literally visible, aria fritta also seems a good way to describe the physical condition of the sky over Milan. But here’s the thing about aria fritta: It’s usually not worth getting too upset over. Milan’s air quality, much like the opinions of random people on the internet, is out of my control.
📸 Finocchio Foto
This week, I’m leaving you with a fun little photo from my adventures around Milan. Enjoy, and see you again soon!
