The first photos of Milan in my archive date back to December 1973. At that time, I was living in New York, where I had been studying photography for a year. For the Christmas holidays, I returned to Florence, with a layover in Milan, the most convenient option.

At the Central Station, I found myself immersed in a crowd of travellers, mostly immigrants from Southern Italy returning to their hometowns. The trains were so full that the aisles were crowded, and some passengers, unable to board through the doors, even entered through the windows.

I don’t remember if I took the train or stopped in Milan. The photos on the film offer only a few clues: the third to last was taken on a tram, and the last two on a street in the center. The next contact sheet, however, shows images of my home garden.

My memory, blurred by time, cannot fill in the few hours’ gap. I will never know what I did downtown, how long I stayed there, or how I got home.

I cannot rule out having visited Milan over the next five years. I may have stopped there without my Nikon, perhaps for a photography or music event. Accustomed to the fast-paced cultural and social life of New York, Milan was the place in Italy that came closest to it.

The first definite visual trace of my return dates back to the summer of 1978, when I took the train and documented the journey across the Po River and the Po Valley to Milan’s Central Station. In the city, I shot more than two rolls of film, a sign that I stayed for at least two days. The proof that I spent the night is a photo of my friends Kitti and Klaus having breakfast in their bedroom.

In the following decade, I photographed intermittently, focusing mainly on documentary assignments about the outskirts, which I carried out using medium-format cameras. For three consecutive years, I participated in the Archivio dello Spazio project, exploring the rural and industrial landscapes of the Milan province, far from the urban frenzy.

I rarely shot in 35mm, but I carried a small pocket-sized Canon with me, capturing spontaneous moments of everyday life—after all, the street photographer in me never truly left. The last black-and-white roll dates back to 1996 and was shot in Piazza della Stazione—a curious coincidence, exactly 23 years after Christmas of ’73.