But tonight, as they watch the opening ceremony, the Milanese will see precious little of their town and its history. Instead, they’ll see Mariah Carey, ads from Alibaba and Visa, and signs emblazoned with “IT’s Your Vibe” — the games’ motto and a painful pun on “Italy”. They may also catch a smell: a whiff of corruption that transcends the old Italian cliché and instead carries to the offices of the grandest multinationals on Earth. And, in a grim way, it all feels fitting. Like the games that it’s hosting, Milan, too, seems intent on throwing off a principled past for a fevered global future, even if that leaves it a mere conquest of capital. 

Milan has always been rich. On the trade route from Frankfurt to Rome, its commercial strength was clear even in the 13th century, when local bigwigs built the Piazza Mercanti. Helped by a fertile countryside, and a complex network of inland canals, this “Merchants Square” was soon famed for its quality wares. Henry VIII may have bought his armor from the city, and there’s a reason hatmakers are still called “milliners” today. Affluence endured long after the city’s native dukes were usurped by outsiders. First came Spanish pikemen, then Napoleon; by 1850, Milan was second only to Vienna within the Habsburg Empire, and boasted vast factories in metalwork and silk.

When it joined the new Kingdom of Italy in 1861, Milan was comfortably the most industrialized town in the country. And it’s here, perhaps, that the city’s self-conception truly starts. A relative giant in a nation of pygmies — at unification, it was larger than Rome — Milan gave its residents ample reason to feel smug, especially when recalling their cosmopolitan history. “Genoa is to Milan what Italy is to Germany,” the singer Fabrizio De André once said. He meant it cruelly, yet Milanesi reveled in their transalpine links, practically Teutonic in their devotion to hard work and haughtiness. Along the way, almost everything was pressed into marching Milan far from the dolce vita stereotype, from its winter fog to its austere and handsome boulevards. The same is true of Milan’s dialect, its bovine vowels and French and German loanwords so different from more languorous tones down south. 

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For decades, in fact, Milan’s self-image was predicated on being a kind of anti-south, especially as millions of peasants came north in search of work. Perhaps its most famous expression is “Oh mia bela Madunina”. The city’s unofficial anthem, still sung by local football fans, is in theory a paean to the gold statue of the Virgin atop the cathedral, for centuries Milan’s highest spot. In practice, though, Giovanni D’Anzi’s 1934 tune is an excuse to compare Milan’s hard-nosed virtues with alleged — and unfair — southern vice. Mocking the melodrama of Naples and Rome, the lyrics pointedly warn that “no one’s ever lazy” beneath the icon’s gaze. D’Anzi doesn’t use the word, but implicit here is an assault on “terùn” — roughly “redneck” and a once-common slur against southerners. 

There’s an irony here. As urbane as the Milanese imagined themselves, their devotion to parochial Italian rivalries, much more than the wider world beyond, meant the city long retained a conservative air. The postwar boom was real enough — the city’s population surged by a quarter in the Fifties — but bluechip firms such as Mondadori (publishing) and Edison (utilities) were basically domestic in outlook. Pirelli gifted the city a new Madunina when its headquarters became Milan’s tallest building in 1961 — but it never really competed with Goodyear, Bridgestone and other global tire brands. 

Beyond the boardroom, though, this parochialism was clearest on the streets. As late as the 2000s, this was largely deaf to the siren calls of international capital. The Pirelli aside, skyscrapers were few. Instead, Milan was a town of Victorian apartments, wan yellow or pink, their courtyards filled with shade and bloated potted palm trees. Large retail chains were unusual. Instead, there were shoe stores with wooden shelves and terrazzo floors, and tobacconists owned by men in beards and faded English smoking jackets. There were trattorie, too, more social clubs than restaurants, where sergeant-stiff waiters served saffron risotto and a pig-head stew called cassœula. Foreign fare was hard to find. Amazingly, Starbucks only arrived in 2018, and came with a marble-topped counter. 

Now, though, this stolid world is crumbling. Over the past decade, some 5,000 foreign millionaires have made the city their home. From American tech bros to Egyptian plutocrats, they have many reasons for coming. Tired of Mayfair phone-grabbers, let alone New York’s squalor, some are drawn to the Lombard capital’s sedate reputation. Geography matters too: just as medieval merchants prized Milan for its strategic location, their successors can ski in the morning and check their Swiss bank vaults at lunch. The Italian government has also welcomed newcomers, levying a flat annual tax on foreign income and assets.

The results are predictable. House prices have leapt by 40% in a decade, costs rising as square-footage goes down. Milan’s luxury property market is proving especially wild, with American, Chinese and even Azeri financiers all racing to snatch up smart palazzi. That naturally makes life harder for lawyers and doctors and other bourgeois professionals — precisely the sorts for whom Milan’s no-nonsense reputation was made. Most middle-class Milanesi can today only dream of a Prada handbag, despite the firm’s 600 worldwide stores. 

Don’t let that last figure fool you: even if outlets in Beijing and Chengdu help soften the blow, Milanese fashion has also suffered. In 2023, a number of luxury brands were forced to abandon their traditional rivalries and face down foreign competition together. Even that, apparently, is not enough. Police have uncovered sweatshops in the suburbs. And if that hints at the ways the new Milan leaves space for malpractice, there are other examples too. The city’s construction boom has already caused scandal, with senior officials accused of taking bribes in return for rushing through permits.

Of course, Milan is no stranger to graft. The so-called “mani pulite” investigation of the Nineties — ultimately resulting in the destruction of postwar Italy’s political class — began here. Silvio Berlusconi made his millions here too. Yet as so often in the city today, it’s hard not to feel that corruption is more frantic and financialized than ever. Amid the usual claims of mafia involvement in the Olympics, prosecutors are also exploring Deloitte’s role in an over-invoicing case. Nothing has been proved, but the consultancy’s “digital services” work for the event is darkly symbolic of the city’s new economy.

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And on the money men go. In 2024, over 1,000 manufacturing firms failed across Milan and its hinterland; countless other Milanese businesses, including the stock exchange itself, have been bought up by foreigners. They still sing D’Anzi’s ballad, meanwhile, but AC Milan supporters today back a team owned by Wall Street. There’s a new Madunina too — a gold replica was fitted atop the Allianz Tower in 2015, for a time the tallest building in Italy, and a further sign of modern Milan’s transnational sovereigns. As for hometown legend Pirelli, its largest shareholder is a chemical giant from Xiong’an, and its fame is as much in calendars as tires. 

Once again, though, this upheaval is clearest on the streets. Eighteen towers have now crossed the 100-meter mark, flanked by sleek living blocks named things like “CityLife”. The number of supermarkets has risen by three quarters in a decade, at the expense of 91 bakeries and over 150 shoe shops. Many that remain are brighter, slicker, their shelves in plastic and their tiled pavements gone. At the tobacconists, the patriarchs are out, replaced by poor migrants selling vapes. Indeed, a broader demographic transformation is also underway: one-in-five Milanese were born abroad, fomenting a culinary revolt and familiar tensions elsewhere. But if these phenomena are related — Italian business lobbies hard for more immigration — for the moment it’s capital that truly robs your breath. Milan now hosts a half-dozen Starbucks, the latecomers dumping the pioneer’s marbled flattery. There are KFCs, too, and near a wonder of a Romanesque church, a Five Guys. “The grills are hot and the doors are open,” proclaimed the managers when it opened in 2018. 

The speed and scale of this shift make Milan in its pomp seem almost touchingly naive, now it faces forces so much huger than “terùn”. Still, it’s Milan’s desperate eagerness to adopt the language and mores of a culture it thrived without for decades that’s most galling. As energetic and ruthless as the multinationals are, after all, no one forced Milan Fashion Week to partner with Starbucks. The way to understand this capitulation, I think, once more involves the city’s myopic form of worldliness. Rather like the Aztecs, lords of their valley yet broken the moment Cortés appeared, the Milanese — in their commerce, their streetscape, their very identity — are utterly helpless before the torrent of customs and cash now unleashed upon their town. Their own traditions were too slow, too aged, too reliant on rhythms lost to time, and easily replaced by servile English puns and bloodless tributes to “shared values”.

Once big money tempts you, then traps you, it’s very hard to flee. So while foreign cash may bring benefits today — jobs, investment, a certain ineffable smoothness — the Milanese should still be fearful. Of course, shimmers of the old town cling on. You can still find good cassœula, especially past the ringroad, and the courtyards will still tempt you in the August sun. All the same, you sense that something vast and special is ending. In December 2024, unhappy at their team’s New York owners, AC Milan supporters unveiled a banner at their San Siro stadium. “We give honour to our champions,” it read. “Symbols of a Milan that no longer exists!” Time, perhaps, for a new proverb.

Short Tony’s death was just the latest in a long line of ultra murders. An “ultra” is an extremist football fan, sort of a cross between a hooligan and a Hell’s Angel. Any murder in that netherworld is newsworthy, but this one more than ever: as his dialect nickname implies, Bellocco was a Calabrian mobster, sent north to offer muscle to Inter’s Curva Nord ultras: in return for a slice of the gang’s lucrative businesses.

Bellocco had been one of the key mercenaries in an ongoing battle with a rival Inter crew, the Irriducibili. When that battle was won, Bellocco had become one of the top bosses of Inter’s terraces. Many of us had thought the ultras had already touched rock bottom in August 2019, when Lazio’s top boss, a drug-slinging stoner called Fabrizio Piscitelli, was shot dead as he sat on a park bench in Rome. But what’s happening in Milan takes the ultra story to a darker place: they are now essentially narco-crews, ready to greenlight mergers with organized crime to dominate Milan’s suburbs.

All this is particularly poignant because Milan is the city that claims to be the cradle of ultra ideology. AC Milan’s famous Fossa dei Leoni (“Lions’ Den”) and Commandos Tigre (“Tiger Commandoes”) both claim to have been founded around 1968, before any other ultra group in Italy. Back then, the ultras were not considered criminals so much as teenage scallywags. The real Milanese outlaws came from the Ligéra. Meaning “The Light” in the local dialect, it encompassed an assortment of petty crooks: pickpockets, pimps, bookies and fences that graduated onto kidnappings and bank jobs.

These days, though, the city is bossed by the ultras. Milan and Inter share the San Siro stadium, its helix staircases looking like springs whatever the angle. The teams’ respective ultras take it in turns to skim off the top of the tens of thousands of punters who come to the stadium every week.

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It all started when the ultras turned their collective back on a sacred tenet of ultradom. Until the early Eighties, it had been a foundational principle that being an ultra meant fighting your enemies — above all enemies from the same city. But when, in 1981, an Inter fan was stabbed to death by a Milan fan, the Milan and Inter ultras negotiated a non-aggression pact.

The major ultra groups from both sides — Nord Kaos and Viking for Inter, the Brigate Rossonero and Commandos Tigre for Milan — began using their sheer force of numbers to make money. Organized hierarchically, these crews started taking over the curtilage of the San Siro, selling fake merch, hiring out parking spaces, levering beers and bapping burgers. A few of them also began offering à la carte highs: coke, speed, weed or E.

Though the Milanese ultras didn’t fight each other, they did fight almost everyone else. Nazzareno Filippini was an Ascoli fan killed by Inter ultras in 1988. Vincenzo Spagnolo, a Genoa supporter, was stabbed to death by a hot-headed Milan fan in January 1995. After those killings, there were more peace conferences.

Some talked of returning to the old days when, they claimed, being an ultra was just a way for waifs to get off their faces and stage-manage the Sunday afternoon spectacle of confetti and pranks. I interviewed hundreds of “purist” ultras for my book on the subject, and most of them lovingly recalled tipped-over cars with number plates from rival cities.

They would speak late into the night about their most memorable striscioni — the long, often witty, banners they unfurled on the terraces. “It truly, truly hurts me to see what happens on the terrace now,” one retired head ultras told me back in 2018. “It makes me suffer greatly… we’ve gone from fist-fights to knives, from knives to… ambushes, to Molotov cocktails, to bombs and to pistols. It keeps getting worse.”

This is partly a symptom of politics. In the Sixties, the ultra movement had used names echoing far-Left liberation movements across the globe (“Fedayeen”), or else evoked Italian partisan bands from the Second World War.

During the Eighties and Nineties, however, many crews turned to the far-Right. The full name, for instance, of Inter’s “Boys” gang was “Boys-SAN”, a reference to Mussolini’s paramilitary Squadre d’Azione.

Giorgio Triani is a sports sociologist who wrote two great books about Italian fans in the Nineties, just as the ultra movement was becoming a crucible for the far-Right. “The Left became disinterested in the terraces,” he says, “and very quickly they became perfectly aligned with the far-Right. They had a need to dominate the vulnerable, the opposition, the losers, the blacks…”

Soon enough, it became commonplace for thousands of supporters to grunt at black players, to interrupt silences for drowned migrants in the Mediterranean, to taunt enemies with allegations they were Jewish and would share the fate of Anne Frank. Lazio, Inter and Verona ultras were at the forefront of this political radicalization, often doing straight-arm salutes and waving swastikas. It even infected the players, with Paolo di Canio unable to resist raising a fascist salute to the Lazio faithful in 2005.

All the while, each passing year made the violence of yesterday seem quaint by comparison. It was money that fed the bloodshed: a police wiretap heard Vittorio Boiocchi — an Inter ultra murdered in 2022 — boast that he made €80,000 a month.

Cash sums that size always attract professional mobsters. And so, long before Bellocco arrived in Milan, there were attempted mergers between Calabrian families and northern ultras. About a decade ago, Juventus’s main crew, the Drughi, allowed a Calabrian family to become part of its racket. Ciccio Bucci, one of these Drughi, was also a fan-liaison officer, and was suspected of having snitched on the group. He was promptly beaten up and ostracized. When he returned to Turin, after a year away in Puglia, he jumped from a famous viaduct outside the city.

It’s not entirely clear who approved Bellocco’s entry to the terraces. But he was fortunate that his ascension occurred just as Inter was bossing Italian football, with the team winning seven trophies so far this decade. The deeper a team goes in a tournament, the more tickets get sold, not just for the stadium but for the planes and buses. Ultras bulk-buy accommodation and food, becoming informal travel agents.

When Inter and Milan met in the semi-final of the 2023 Champions’ League, they agreed to share ticket revenues from the final whoever won. Inter went through, but Milan ultras still made money. Rather than going all in — as ultra philosophy insists you always should — they had essentially “shorted” their own team.

It’s anyway unsurprising that the ultras now cover Milan like a spider’s web: if you want to trade, borrow or buy on the streets of the city, the chances are you’ll cross paths with an ultra. Luca Lucci, an AC Milan hooligan who has done time for drugs-trafficking and GBH, has provided “event-management” services — everything from body-guarding to ticket sales — to rappers like Fedez and Emis Killa. Lucci has also opened a chain of tattoo parlours called Italian Ink. It’s a world no more controlled by teenage tearaways but by old men with names like “Il Barone” (The Baron). When he was shot dead, Boiocchi was 69.

There are advantages to both sides of the mafia-ultra merger. When an ultra finds himself needing to overcome rival groups on the terrace, it’s tempting to call in those pros. And for the mercenaries, there’s the lure of a cash turnover in the low millions for which the punishments are negligible. Ticket-touting, for instance, is only given a custodial sentence if accompanied by more serious crimes.

But Andrea Beretta had apparently grown resentful of his thrusting Calabrian colleague, always in his space and living just around the corner. Bellocco had sought to assert his dominance over Beretta, showing him what he called his family album. “My mother has done 25 years in prison,” he was heard on a wire-tap. “She’s still in prison and she’s 74!”

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It’s a story that isn’t over yet. Bellocco was a made man, and his murder will not be without consequences for his alleged killer. Beretta will either enter witness protection and turn on his mates, or else risk a revenge killing. “It was unthinkable 30 years ago that it would have reached these levels,” says Triani. “Back then the terraces were unhealthy, sure, but now [the ultra world] has become a parasitic cancer completely decontextualized from football and sport.” No wonder it’s a movement now more studied by criminologists than sociologists.

Nineteen ultras from both sides were arrested in the aftermath of Bellocco’s killing last autumn. Most are charged with assault, extortion and being part of a “criminal association” (essentially a gang). The Inter ultras are also accused of having “abetted” the ‘Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia of whom Bellocco was part.

This incremental professionalization of ultra gangs goes against another shibboleth of the faith: that no individual makes money from the group. Lucci’s revealing defense is that he’s “only ever made money from drug-dealing, never from being an ultra”. He would rather plead guilty to something the state considers a crime than to betraying the gang, namely by dipping his fingers into his own crew’s till.

Not for the first time, in other words, money and power have flipped a counterculture. And now, commanding voters and consumers by the thousands, they’ve even entered mainstream politics. Again, there’s an overlap of interests: politicians gain street cred from association with organized fan groups, and organized groups can shift electoral results.

Lucci, now arrested, has enjoyed deliberately public handshakes and hugs with Matteo Salvini, the former interior minister (now deputy prime minister), and himself a die-hard Milanista. The former mayor of Catania, Salvo Pogliese, and Daniele Belotti, a former League parliamentarian, have also played on their terrace notoriety to rally fans to the ballot box.

It all feels a long way from those early Sixties days. Back then, the first commandment of ultra faith was fidelity to the borgo, about fighting for your hometown, even if it was just a crappy suburb without hope. But the movement is now as globalized as any multinational, and the striscioni feel like an afterthought.