A spiral-shaped walking path and jogging track wind to the top of the hill, which is called “star mountain.” It’s not so tall that you feel like you can reach out and touch the stars in the night sky or anything—it’s more of an endearingly small mountain—so I had considered the name a bit overblown. But it turns out that the mountain is manmade, and that there’s more depth to the origin of the name than I realized.
Milan suffered tremendous bombing damage during the war. Walls and balconies crumbled in the city, roofs and tables and beds were reduced to rubble. The streets were piled with wreckage. The first step in rebuilding after the war was to remove the debris from the city streets. They decided that an area called San Siro would be ideal as a temporary collection site, so they started piling it up there. Because of that, the pile was called “San Siro Mountain” at the time.
Nobody could decide or figure out what to do with all the rubble, which meanwhile continued to build up. The people of Milan saw it as a graveyard of their former homes, going as far as to write dark songs about it.
Eventually, someone came up with the inspired idea to actually turn the pile of debris into a real mountain—so they covered it with dirt, planted trees on it, and installed a walking path. The construction went on for twenty years. At first, the site was no bigger than a baseball diamond, but it ultimately grew to ten times that size.
Getting the mountain to the beautiful state it is in today was a rough process. Inwardly, the Milanese wondered whether war debris was really the only thing buried in the mountain. Before it was turned into an actual mountain, many people were convinced—given all the people that kept going back and forth to the mountain in secret—that there were discarded parts of stolen cars there, or even dead bodies. None of this was ever publicly talked about, however.
The first thing that was done in order to overcome this dark, negative image was to rename the hill “star mountain.” At one time, someone had the ingenious idea to cover the western slope with artificial snow, install lights and a ski lift, and create a ski area there. It apparently turned out to be a great success, with companies and businesses holding ski competitions on the slope and the kids playing on sleds there during the winter. I’m pretty impressed at how all-out they went. It reminds me of Japan creating an indoor ski area.
Once the mountain’s image had been redeemed, the ski area was probably no longer necessary. Today, it has been so long forgotten that there are Milanese who don’t even know it ever existed.
