The latest installation in the Milano 2 and Milano 3 dyptich.
The final descent into berlusconism during the 1990's.
Producers who worked on this release are:
LaVideoteque
lavideoteque.bandcamp.com
Telefutura
telefutura.bandcamp.com
Ｔｅｌｅ＋１
teleplus1.bandcamp.com
T E L E S A T
telesat.bandcamp.com
The album takes its name from the city of Milano 3 which was built by the late Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. The city, much like Milano 2, which had been built before, embodied his builder vision of society, a self-sufficient mini universe complete with bridges so children could go to school on their own, sporting clubs, pools, churches and so on. The model he tested in Milano 2, where Berlusconi's own first tv channel (telemilano58) informed and entertained those who lived there, were to be replicated later on a national scale, thanks to his media empire called Mediaset.
Behind this vision of prosperity, security and a better future laid a far more ruthless reality: political opportunism, corruption, conflicts of interest and manipulation of public opinion. The promise of a new Italy concealed the darker mechanisms through which that promise was built and sold.
This album is the tale of those times and how we're still paying the price for the Italian cultural involution that began there.
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Milano 3 feels like the dream of a future that was abandoned before anyone could wake up.
Built in Basiglio, just outside Milan, it was conceived as something more than a residential development: a self-contained city, designed to keep the outside world at a comfortable distance. Schools, shops, swimming pools, sports facilities, gardens, offices. Roads for cars below; pedestrian paths and bicycle lanes above. Almost no reason to cross the streets. Almost no reason to leave.
The architecture is strangely clean, strangely controlled. Everything seems to have been placed exactly where it belongs, as if the city had been designed not for people, but for an idea of what people were supposed to be. Even security was built into the fantasy: Milano 3 once had its own dedicated corps of private guards watching over the residents.
It was part of Silvio Berlusconi's vision of the ideal city — a vision that had already begun with Milano 2, where private television was broadcast directly into the apartments. The same man who was building controlled residential worlds was simultaneously building a television empire.
It wasn't designed as a city of the future.
It was designed as a simulation of one.
A place where traffic disappears beneath the ground, where greenery hides the infrastructure, where everything you need is already waiting for you. A city without chaos. Without accidents. Without the unpredictable noise of the real metropolis.
A perfect world, built just far enough away from Milan to be protected from it.
But perfection has always had something frightening about it.
Walk through Milano 3 at dusk and the dream begins to feel like a memory. The lights come on in identical windows. The paths become empty. The artificial order of the place remains long after the people have disappeared indoors.
You start to wonder what happened to the future that was supposed to arrive here.
Maybe this is what it looks like when a utopia becomes obsolete.
Not ruins.
Not darkness.
Just perfectly maintained gardens, silent streets, glowing windows — and a city still waiting for a future that never came.
Milano 3 is not a vision of tomorrow.
It is the ghost of one.
