BOSCO VERTICALE by Robert Wilde

Modern Milan! It wasn’t fighting the traditional Milan, nor did it try to imitate it.

She had splurged on a new, white coat and decided to initiate this fashion relationship with a visit to the vertical forest, or, as the Milanese called it, the Bosco Verticale, one of the most fascinating places for modern architecture in Milan.

The vertical forest was a pair of high risers with hundreds of trees growing on countless terraces, making them a live-in sculpture that disappeared in a coat of green leaves every summer. They looked over a prairie sized lawn. Around, around this extensive lawn stood many more high risers of inventive architectural design. And she stood right in the centre of all of it.

And suddenly it was its own planet, small, tiny, covered with grass, high risers at the horizon. The world was so small you could see the curvature of the horizon and you could walk around its globe in just one hour. The towers stood at angles to the horizon – the world was so small there wasn’t even a clear sense of “up”.

That’s when she awoke. She had just sat down in the grass for a moment. It was late. The sun was starting to dip between the high rises, and so she rose, stretched to her full height, and went home. Milan had, in the instant of a dream, become her second home.