It takes half an hour to go on foot from the bookstore to my place. First you have to follow the canal up to the basin and then you just walk all the way down the avenue up to Porta Romana.
Little more than a mile. It would make a pleasurable journey because of the bodegas and the trams, the sporadic yet impressive trees, the old courtyards you can spot behind large openings on the condo facades, the clusters of showing Bocconi students out of the bars, the bunch of northern Africans smiling and talking idling across the sidewalks, the Filipinos or the transvestites or the girls or the elderly singles and couples rushing in all directions.
Those are city's lives surrounding you, appearing and disappearing rolling under the shades, sometimes old and beautiful, of the milanese houses. You should be able to enjoy that. I personally love city's confusion, the crowd, all the faces and attires and the voices and stuff. Make me feel I'm pushing into something I am different from and part of.

But, you're in Italy. Cars are there all the time. And particularly with these beautiful days of upcoming spring they are this unbearable and inexplicable and yet relentless presence.
Particularly in the evening, they obsess you without any hiatus. At the glowing lights of semaphores and signboards you hear them honking to passersby if they cross too slowly the street, you see them cutting trams routes pushing bicycles against the endless line of parked cars, you see them passing each other with impulsive accelerations, pressing the music of their stereos against your ears, blowing in carbon monoxides straight up to your nose.
Motorbikes obsess you too: their accelerations are so noisy they suck up all the idiocy around in a second and scatter it all over the place. They are typically ridden over the sidewalks at short stages, and as they swirl pass you so you have no choice but to walk in the invisible stinky cloud of their exhaust trying not to breathe.
(Honest, I hate motorbikes, even more than I hate cars. First of all I don't have those kind of macho issues. And plus, if I ever hear again someone say how beautiful it is to ride a motorbike because this way you're "really into the environment" (what environment?!) I may vomit on the spot.)

It's this the metal and mechanical anarchy that constantly says: I am your enemy. Everything is my enemy. I may be useful, but I am still your enemy.

Still I know there's people behind the appearance of this metalmechanical anarchy, and I cannot hate them because they don't know any better. If I'm tired of fighting my way through the rumble and the poisoning, all I can do is to stop by and wait for a tram. The trams are frequent, most of them are still of the very old orange kind and incredibly beautiful and pleasurable to ride so you can cope with that. You just need your tickets.

As you go to stamp your ticked this time, though, the weirdest thing happens: there's a new type of ticket stamping machine aboard, and it's trying to suck in your ticket with all its book of tickets attached. It's not the regular stamping machine, you realize: it's the one for the new electronic tickets we all will have to use in the next future.
One more electronic badge so they will always know when or where we come and go. A gentle old man gives me a brief explanation of what's up with that. I had no idea this was actually going on, to the point of replacing any paper ticket around with something electronic.

So these are the choices you have in the end, as a respectable citizen of this wealthy city: have a walk into mechanical deadly anarchy, or take a ride into fascist oppressive technology, so now don't say you don't have options.