Six in the morning and the Galleria is mine. Just mine and a man with a broom who does not look up. The glass ceiling holds a grey light, the kind that hasn’t decided what the day will be yet. My boots on the mosaic floor sound louder than they should. Somewhere above, pigeons shift in the ironwork like they’re settling an argument.
I find the bull. Everyone finds the bull eventually, the mosaic one, worn smooth where centuries of heels have spun on it for luck. I don’t spin. I just look at how thin the gold has gotten in that one spot, how much wanting it takes to wear down stone. By noon there will be a line for this. A line, for a floor. At dawn it’s just a bull looking a little tired, like it’s already been through the day twice.
The shops are still shuttered, gates pulled down over Prada, over Louis Vuitton, over all the names that make this place sound like a receipt. But without the lit windows and the bags and the perfume drifting out of doorways, you can see what it actually is underneath the commerce. A cross shape. A dome. Someone built this like a church and then filled it with leather goods, and at this hour the building doesn’t seem to mind reminding you which came first.
I bring the Leica up once, twice. The light isn’t really there yet, not enough to trust, but I shoot anyway. Some mornings the camera and I agree to be patient together. There’s a smell of espresso starting somewhere out of sight, and wet stone, the kind of damp that never fully leaves Milanese mornings even in July. *Che silenzio.* I say it out loud just to hear a voice, even my own, land somewhere in all that echo.
An old man crosses diagonally, unhurried, newspaper under his arm, like he’s done this exact walk since before the shops had names. He doesn’t look at me. I don’t look at him for long either. There’s a kind of privacy that happens in public places when nobody’s watching, and this is that, briefly, before the tour groups arrive and the cameras multiply and the Galleria goes back to being a cathedral for spending money.
I sit on the step near the octagon for a while, doing the math on how many hours of solitude a person can buy just by setting an alarm. Not many. Worth it anyway.
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