MILANO ECONOMICA E LE SUE STRATEGIE | Istituto Lombardo - Accademia di Scienze e Lettere - Incontri di Studio

Coming to the modern age and deep inside the national unification of the 19. century, Milan mantained the highest ranking of urban populating in Europe. This can be explained considering the fact that this town has continued to be a strategical point of intersection between the Po Valley and the Alps, thanks to its integration in a regional context characterized by the factors of economic cohesion which kept it together, more than by the political borders in which it was splitted. Also because this occured inside a populating setting that made Milan a kind of “magnet” of one among the most urbanized areas in Europe. To make it such was at that point a review course of the economic hub around which the town moved, caused by the different treatment reserved since 1781 to the part within the townwall compared to its suburb (Corpi Santi) and overtaken also from a custom point of view only in 1898. It was exactly in this suburban area, the largest of the town limits, that in second half of the nineteenth century a process of productive differentiation occurred culminating with the settlemnent of the most important section of the modern local industry. Here developed a strong immigration that the agricultural crisis of the 80s couldn’t stop. And here again under its influence, an incredibly “building fever” had increased. The expansion of buildings had linked with the big building construction and urban works carried out within the townwall as the area of the ex Lazzaretto or the ex Piazza d’Armi. The companies and banks that had carried them out had been affected by the sector crisis originating in Milan after 1890, nevertheless with effect far less disruptive than in Rome. Effects limited less by the rescue packages of the Milan Municipality for the Subsidy Fund of Builder, than by a kind of banking system well prepared to the distribution of commercial credit or anyway against collateral, mostly if land guarantee. However it was high time for Milan to enter in a financial circuit with strenghts in the foundation of two new mixed banks as Comit and Credit. Therefore, under the patronage of the german capital and investing in a custom policy increasingly oriented in a protectionist step, the conditions were created to the raise of a fully modern industrialized Milan, even if achieved in a very unusual way, attributed to the model of “sequential expansions” sketched out long ago by Gino Luzzato e recalled lately by Luciano Cafagna