This is not photography's finest moment, I grant you. I cannot for the life of me recall what I was trying to achieve in this shot, bearing in mind that it's coming up to 7 years since I took it.

However there are some "time and place" memories associated with it, which is why it's contaminating my gallery.

The mesh-surrounded piece of green in the middle is the Piazza Filippo Meda. Within it is a notable moving sculpture called Grande Disco di Arnaldo Pomodoro, which dates from 1971. Now EITHER I didn't see it, or it was covered up or removed for maintenance given that the piazza is fenced off. Either way, it was one of many things that were missed, as I discussed in the previous shot.

The building beyond is one of the grander branches of the Banca Popolare di Milano, which is part of the Banco BPM Group. Why is this frustrating? There are two things to be aware of. The word "Bank" originally comes from a word for "bench", in both English and Italian; as in, the bench that deals were transacted on. Italian, like most other European languages but unlike (modern) English, assigns all nouns to a gender. As in, a grammatical gender. It's divided into masculine and feminine but they have little to do with biological sex, they just affect how the nouns change in the plural and so on. In MOST cases this is relatively logical and in MANY cases masculine nouns end in an O and feminine ones with an A.

So what gender is the word for "bank"? Weeellll... the word relating to "bench" in the form of a seat or workbench (from which the word "bank" was ultimately derived) is masculine; il banco. HOWEVER the word as it was applied to financial institutions became feminine (LA bancA), thus we see the name "BancA popolare di Milano" on the wall of this building.

HOWEVER... certain specific banks have retained the use of the masculine "banco", such as this bank's parent the BancO BPM Group.

I normally love Italian since it is far more logical and consistent than English - and don't even get me started on French. But every so often it will annoy you with little inconsistencies like this, or the way body parts change gender in the plural (il dito, le dita), not to mention the required use of the subjunctive that English rightly put a bullet to about 70 years ago. Granted Italian's use of prepositions is far from... logical... but English is in no position to talk about THAT. (Turn off your language autopilot and think about how English uses prepositions some time, and you'll see what I mean.)

At this time I was standing on the portico of a clothing outlet store on the fringe of the fashion district of Milano. The road directly in front of me is the Piazza Belgioioso, but the road that we can see primarily in this shot is the Via Adalberto Catena. I'm not sure what Adalberto Catena did to earn a road being named after him, since I can find very little information about him aside from the fact that he was a priest who lived from 1822 to 1902, and a photo of him which was usefully tagged "before 1912". (Well, yeah, duh... I think we can safely assume that it was "before 19*0*2, come to that.)

Filippo Meda, on the other hand, who had the green piazza named after him, had a more notable legacy even though he only has Wikipedia pages in Italian and... Swedish??, not English. He lived from 1 January 1869 to Milan, 31 December 1939 (which is a pretty round period if you look at the dates), and in that time he was a lawyer, journalist, editor, politician, banker, minister of finance in the national government during World Wart I, treasurer after it, and an enthusiastic supporter of Catholics entering into Italian politics. "You what, weren't Catholics ALWAYS in Italian politics?" I hear you ask. No. It's often forgotten now that what became (most of) the future Italia in 1861 came from what had been, for centuries, the Papal States. The Papacy was none too happy about losing that much political and financial power to the newly formed nation and Pope Pius IX issued an edict known as the "non expidit" encouraging Catholics to boycott Italian elections as both electors and candidates. This issue wasn't fully resolved until Mussolini secured the Concordat of 1929. Meda did not agree with that policy and felt that the only way for Catholics to influence the Italian state was to engage with it, which he argued for vigorously.

And thus, he had a small but attractive Piazza named after him, and 80-something years after his death someone on the far side of the world would be looking up information about him to caption a mediocre photograph.

I guess I should go back and do some shots that are worthy of both him and the piazza.