‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ Puts This Italian City’s Religious Sites In The Spotlight
The Italian city of Milan takes center stage in “The Devil Wears Prada 2.” The film showcases the city’s most iconic places, such as the Duomo, the Pinacoteca di Brera and the church courtyard and convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, which houses Leonardo Da Vinci’s iconic mural “The Last Supper.”
The film production managed to shoot a scene with Meryl Streep, playing the character of Miranda Priestly, in an empty Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, a place typically teeming with tourists year-round.
To see Da Vinci’s masterpiece, visitors book their tickets months in advance. Twenty years ago, people simply walked in. So for the scenes in the museum featuring “The Last Supper,” the production recreated the room on a soundstage.
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So how did a city with an industrial past that tourists would overlook in favor of Rome, Florence and Venice when visiting Italy, turn into a global tourist destination?
It all began when Milan hosted the 2015 World Expo, which attracted 21 million visitors between May and October of that year.
“The turning point was the Expo. Milan became a more beautiful, welcoming city and attracted a lot of international investment,” said Ferruccio De Bortoli, former editor-in-chief of the newspaper Il Corriere de la Sera.
Milan prepared for the event like an athlete preparing to compete in the Olympic Games. The local government began work several years in advance, renovating areas such as the Milano Centrale train station and the Darsena, the city’s old port.
It extended the metro system, increased the number of bike lanes and repaired streets to improve traffic flow. It also renovated the Isola district, in the northern part of the city, where it opened the pedestrian, elevated and circular Gae Aulenti square, where office buildings showcase Milan’s modern side.
“Milan had never been a tourist city in its history. It was an industrial city that shut down during the summer. There was no one in August. Today we have a phenomenon of overtourism, like Barcelona,” De Bortoli said.
He attributed the success in placing Milan as a global destination to the local governments, who stayed committed to the growth, regardless of their political affiliation.
Before the Expo, Milan was known as a hub for fashion — home to Prada, Armani, Versace and Dolce & Gabbana — design, finance, medicine, life sciences and education.
Milan also attracts students from all over the world. According to the Assolombarda Study Center, 7.4% of its 232,000 college and graduate students in the 2022-2023 academic year were international.
For Catholics, it was a crucial religious place in history. As the capital of the Western Roman Empire from 286 AD through 402 AD, it was there that emperors Constantine I and Licinius issued the edict that ended religious persecution, allowing Christians to worship freely. St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Ambrose also lived in Milan, with St. Ambrose, bishop of the city, baptizing St. Augustine in 387 AD.
St. Augustine’s remains are kept in Pavia, some 19 miles (30 kilometers) south of the city. His tomb took on renewed significance with Pope Leo XIV, the first Augustinian to lead the Catholic Church. Milan is known for the Ambrosian rite, or Milanese rite, named after St. Ambrose. It differs from the Roman rite in the structure of the mass and the liturgical calendar, customs and vestments. During the Counter-Reformation, the city was a driving force, with the archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Charles Borromeo, at the forefront of the church’s renewal.
As the largest Catholic archdiocese in Europe and one of the largest in the world, Milan has more than 1,100 churches, from the famous Duomo – the city’s cathedral – to historic basilicas such as Sant’Ambrogio and Santa Maria delle Grazie.
The Winter Olympics this past February were the latest major event Milan hosted, with 1.3 million tickets sold for both events that took place in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo. This meant that some two million people stayed in both cities or their surrounding areas.
The tourism boom has made everything more expensive.
“It has had a negative social effect, in the sense that housing prices have increased more than in London,” De Bortoli said. “This has meant the expulsion of the working class and even of the middle class from the city.”
Graciela Ibáñez is a journalist with a Master of Arts from Columbia Journalism School, where she graduated in 2008. She works as a professor of journalism at Universidad Gabriela Mistral and at Universidad Viña del Mar in Chile. She covers Chile for foreign media outlets, including TRT World, Americas Quarterly and The Art Newspaper. She worked as a reporter for Dow Jones Newswires and REDD Intelligence in Santiago and for Debtwire in New York City. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Viña del Mar.