It’s surprising to learn that for generations, bicycles were the primary mode of transport through the streets of Milan for most people. I also tried to get around the city by bicycle for a time, but I soon gave up. Mainly because unlike Japan, bicycles are not allowed on sidewalks and are expected to share the road with cars. There are quite a few unlicensed drivers in Italy, and even if they are licensed, it’s a country where everyone seems to think they’re a racecar driver (maybe the fact that Ferrari is Italian has something to do with it…). So you can probably imagine that it’s not that easy for a bicycle to travel on regular streets. On top of that, some areas are still paved with bumpy cobblestone instead of asphalt, and my pitiful little Japanese bottom just can’t take the impact.


Bicycle theft is also rampant in Italy, and your bike is likely to get stolen no matter how many times you wrap the latest chain around it. Even if you get a beat-up old bike in the hopes that nobody will steal it, someone will probably just tell you that you’re an idiot, since those crappy bikes are the first to get stolen. You’ll give up right then and there.


Something else, too. Once night falls and you’re trying to ride home, you’ll sometimes find hordes of cyclists riding around the Milanese streets. If you run into them, you won’t be able to move for twenty or thirty minutes—there’s simply no choice but to wait for them to pass through.



Apparently Milan is the only city in the world that still has cycling parties. I remember hearing that huge crowds would leave Milan and pedal north for a hundred kilometers. And aside from these parties, a cycling group called Critical Mass meets every Thursday night and moves around as a group, blocking drivers in a kind of ecological protest. The movement occurs at various places around Italy. And—you guessed it—I’d sometimes run into these Critical Mass cyclists. (They had their 20th anniversary this year on February 27, so they started in the afternoon instead of just riding at night.)



Starting in 2020, Milan started putting in cycling paths like crazy all around the city. You’d wake up to find that a multi-lane road had suddenly turned into a single car lane and a bicycle lane. I wasn’t the only city resident to get confused by how many there were. There were actually more than a few drivers that had the nerve to purposely drive in the cycling lane. I’d even freak myself out sometimes realizing that the car lane I had been driving in had suddenly turned into a bicycle lane without me noticing.

The pandemic seemed to cause a lot of Milanese to switch to bicycles and kick scooters as a way to get around, and they’re all likely to start filling up the bike lanes. But recently you see a lot of bicycles and kick scooters traveling in lanes where they shouldn’t be, and there are increasing reports of bicycle delivery people taking chances as a way to save time.

Maybe there will come a day where Milan has become so bicycle-friendly and packed with so many cyclists that it will feel strange to even go out in a car…