Italy, lecco

Italy, lecco

Italy, lecco

Crespi d'Adda

By Michael Quin

My first sight of the town is, almost cube shaped under a turret, the Crespi family castle on my right, and behind that above the treeline, a proud couple of prominent smoke stacks. Herein lies the particular tail that is Crespi d’Adda, a veritable museum piece of progress as it was understood here at the end of the 19th century. What fascinates is it's logic, at once both cold and so chillingly familiar.

More than a century ago the Crespi brothers saw industrialisation rising in their region, and ended up not just buying into the dream, but finally riding it to a logical extreme. They erected a cotton production factory on their family property, then set about building a town for the sole purpose of staffing this factory, for generations to come. In no shy way, every stone was laid to serve this end. In this way Crespi d’Adda, on a junction of the Adda and ????? rivers in northern Italy, was born. Today it remains there, intact and unchanged since 1929, under UNESCO patronage.

To walk through Crespi is to see the lives of those who lived, worked and died there, literally mapped out. As you pass the hospital and school, the impression of grand planned living comes to you down straight streets, then comes the church and you realise it is a different type of grand plan here. The church, an assumed focus of centralisation in any Italian town, here lies with space around it, and to me seemed to look up at its opposite construction, outmanoeuvred. The giant factory, beaming even in disuse, sprawls the length of town with hypnotically repetitive architecture. It appears the way factories appear in Pictionary, or in nightmares.

The slanty roofed magazines, as I expected, were there with the grand iton entrance gate, the smoke stacks, the bricks, a clock. Opposite this factory sit the houses, larger ones for higher ranked workers, smaller yet still proud homes for the rest, on a grid pattern with every road eventually leading to work.

The clock at the entrance to the factory hangs frozen in progress, at 8 minutes to 5. I thought of an eternal last shift. One senses quickly that this town is forever fused to its workhouses. What other sense has bound it together? I strain so as maybe to hear the ghosts pacing the production lines inside, but end up imagining them wandering the streets with me as I trespass - a non worker in this town of work. The fact that most of Crespi’s current residents are direct descendents of the original factory workers aides this sense of haunting continuation.

There is no mistake what is being said in this place. The rawest materials lie neatly stacked and at every angle while machines lie housed in shelters where men once trudged every day to feed them. Crespi was always it's factory, even after it's closure.

With my back to the factory I walk the main street and soon reach the other end of town. Here is the Crespi town cemetery. Those very people who studied in the school at the start of town, then laboured a lifetime in the centre, could finally rest at the edge of town in this cemetery.

I thought of a direct path, paved all the way from childhood to the end, with architectural signposts along the road. Again as I expected, green rows, well cut grass around well kept graves, and a breezy view back down the main street and that couple, the two disused smokestacks.

On returning back down the mainstreet I decide to take a winding route. It seemed to me a small suburb, blocks of houses with lawns which to me all evoked the same mood. The entire town is in fact this one orderly suburb. And while thinking over suburbia I thought also of birth, work and the infinite beyond. Crespi evokes these thoughts, as it was designed to do.

Yet for whatever claims it makes, and however terrifyingly straight is the road paved from work to death, Crespi still has life. I saw it at last, in the clothes on the lines, there again later with the broom by the open church door. A single old lady walking her dog on a long leash. As I near the edge of town, I notice the buzzing sound of schoolchildren, for the first time.

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A Chorus (Summer days in Monza)

Helmets, casually by their side hang, Vespa keys low in their pockets.

Dark shades obscure their estimations, these characters decorated like birds, in shady piazzas.

Like birds expending so much energy to attract and to impress, only not so convincing in purpose as the birds, not nearly so charming in their dance.

These, the embodiment of this small city forever parading and masquerading, are singing a song I can never grasp.

In long gilded Monza days, afternoon sun illuminates window arrangements, of necessities we’re supposed to wake up to buy. Prices shock with logic mysterious. Why our sun chooses to illuminate them is another mystery. Even in this light it’s a chorus I cannot understand.

Senegalese urchins or merchants, depending on whether you are looking to buy, hawk fake leather bags, belts and wallets and yet their price seems closer to any reality than the originals behind glass.

Then a confusing scramble (confusing because nobody runs in these streets for strolling), the Senegalese flee another police patrol, of swaggering scorning men with manicured goatees, in half pursuit. Some transactions are cut half way, suddenly its Wall Street-like decisions of whether to buy this instant or forever miss the bargain, who knows what to do?!

But no matter, returning five minutes later there they are again, to offer rich women style at a poor man’s price, then the street parade rolls on, those decorated birds still fluttering around the piazza, all the while Monza singing a chorus I can’t quite comprehend.

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