Let’s be honest. We’d like to go shopping at the market, buy the Piennolo red tomatoes, haggle for the most delicious horse cut, but we don’t have time, we don’t feel like it, we don’t have. The idea of going to the market puts us at peace with ourselves, with the world and with Greta. Who wouldn’t want to dress up as a superhero against the Town Hall and boycott the large-scale retail trade for the small farmers of the Langhe?

And instead, as they told us on this tour through the covered markets of Milan, young and old are rarely seen among the fruit and vegetable stalls, some remember to come during the weekend, others more sporadically. And to think that in this very pilgrimage of ours – from Nolo to Lorenteggio – we discovered exceptional products, helpful and passionate people, comic characters almost Pirandellian. Like Luca, who has been working at the Corvetto municipal market for 32 years, and explains us how to cook the trippa; Maria, who is from Monza, speaks to us in Milanese dialect, complains about the flow of people; who gave us the recipe for the sauce with fennel sausage, who wanted to offer us a bianchino at 10 am. We accepted. The result, regardless of prices, competition and genuineness of the products, is a beautiful mosaic of life.

Service communication: the markets that interest this guide are those covered – the municipal ones are a total 21 – scattered in the urban network. Some of them have recently been subject to requalification (Darsena, Suffragio), while the Municipality has just opened a call for tenders for the allocation of space in ten others. The model Boqueria of Barcelona, which said among us cannibalizes the small shopkeeper and attracts masses of tourists biting and fleeing with the entrance of the big spenders, should become a reference point for these old neighborhood markets.

And if this is the direction, I do not know what will happen to Maria, Luca and all those we interviewed. Because if instead of the small bakery comes the great master baker, instead of the provincial butcher the great Farinettiana company, who will really lose? We have chosen these markets because, according to our unquestionable judgment, they are the most authentic (Monza, Lorenteggio, Ca’ Granda), but also the coolest (Darsena, Suffraggio); they cover almost all the areas of Milan and are easily reachable. Here our selection to make you start to abandon the supermarket that plucks you and approach these realities sometimes a little decadent, sometimes very characteristic, but certainly resistant.

Translated by Sila Turku Askin