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last war.”
    The bombed-out houses didn’t have the timeworn tranquility of those ancient remains that now seemed reconciled with death, but peeped out sinisterly from their grim voids as though affected by lupus.
    â€œI don’t know why there’s been no attempt to build in this area,” said Braggadocio. “Perhaps it’s protected, perhaps the owners make more money from the parking lot than from rental houses. But why leave evidence of the bombings? This area frightens me more than Via Bagnera, though it’s good because it tells me what Milan was like after the war. Not many places bring back what the city was like almost fifty years ago. And this is the Milan I try to seek out, the place where I used to live as a child. The war ended when I was nine. Every now and then, at night, I still seem to hear the sound of bombing. But not just the ruins are left: look at the corner of Via Morigi, that tower dates back to the 1600s, and not even the bombs could bring it down. And below, come, there’s this tavern, Taverna Moriggi, that dates back to the early 1900s—don’t ask why the tavern has one
g
more than the road, the city authority must have gotten its street signs wrong, the tavern is much older, and that should be the correct spelling.
    We walked into a large room with red walls and a bare ceiling from which hung an old wrought-iron chandelier, a stag’s head at the bar, hundreds of dusty wine bottles along the walls, and bare wooden tables (it was before dinnertime, said Braggadocio, and they still had no tablecloths . . . later they’d put on those red-checked cloths and, to order, you had to study the writing on the blackboard, as in a French brasserie). At the tables were students, old-fashioned bohemian types with long hair—not in the ’60s style but that of poets who once wore broad-brimmed hats and
lavallière
cravats—and a few old men in fairly high spirits; it was difficult to tell whether they had been there since the beginning of the century or whether the new proprietors had hired them as extras. We picked at a plate of cheeses, cured meats, and
lardo di Colonnata
, and drank some extremely good merlot.
    â€œNice, eh?” said Braggadocio. “Seems like another world.”
    â€œBut what attracts you to this Milan, which ought to have vanished?”
    â€œI’ve told you, I like to see what I’ve almost forgotten, the Milan of my grandfather and of my father.”
    He had started to drink, his eyes began to shine, with a paper napkin he dried a circle of wine that had formed on the old wooden table.
    â€œI have a pretty wretched family history. My grandfather was a Fascist leader in what was later called the ominous regime. And back in 1945, on April 25, he was spotted by a partisan as he was trying to slip away not far from here, in Via Cappuccio; they took him and shot him, right there at that corner. It wasn’t until much later that my father found out. He, true to my grandfather’s beliefs, had enlisted in 1943 with the Decima Mas commando unit, and had then been captured at Salò and sent off for a year to Coltano concentration camp. He got through it by the skin of his teeth, they couldn’t find any real accusations against him, and then, in 1946, Togliatti gave the go-ahead for a general amnesty—one of those contradictions of history, the Fascists rehabilitated by the Communists, though perhaps Togliatti was right, we had to return to normality at all costs. But the normality was that my father, with his past, and the shadow of his father, was jobless, and supported by my seamstress mother. And he gradually let himself go, he drank, and all I remember about him is his face full of little red veins and watery eyes, as he rambled on about his obsessions. He didn’t try to justify fascism (he no longer had any ideals), but said that to condemn fascism, the antifascists had told many hideous