The other night, Cristina and I did something we rarely do: we went to a party. Our host had invited us to the worksite of a future commercial operation already present in several Italian towns, namely Florence, Turin, and Rome.

The idea is to develop an area of the city where the population can gather, in the first place to buy and or eat food, but also to meet with friends, for art exhibits, book presentations, music concerts, workshops and the like.

In other terms, in the words of the founder Umberto Montano, the focus of his creation, the Mercato Centrale, is a place where everything spins around one single notion: the Italian Cuisine, a national asset which he sets over three pillars: tradition, artistry, family cookbooks.

If the shopping center is the nemesis of the neighbor shop – the grocery, the bakery, the butcher, the fish market – the Mercato Centrale is a location where you can find every single operation united under one roof. In a place like this, in the vision of Umberto Montano, the store owners appear as the ministrants attending to a great tasting ritual.

The guests choose what attracts them most from the specialty counters surrounding a large table area, and either part to whatever destination they are aimed to, or sit to consume their food, alone or with friends or family.

In a city like Milan, the esthetic part of a project is very important for the success of any operation. The environment in the Mercato Generale applies to each venue, allure, and glitter of the artistic enterprises. This is made possible by an appealing design and by conveying to the place those activities named in the second paragraph of this script.

That’s it. Now, back to the party.

The music was being performed by “The Uppertones”, a trio of trombone, vocals, piano, & drums led by Mr.T-Bone and dedicated to the sound of the ’50s in Jamaica, the Jamaican R’n’B, Jamaican boogie, calypso, & mento.

More music by djs Alessio Bertalot, Marco Rigamonti and Fabio De Luca.

Wine and aperitifs flowing at will but, being the counter at one end of a long corridor, opposite to the music, and being the crowd rather thick, nobody exceeded to a point to make a fool of himself.