MILAN — Unlike Cortina d’Ampezzo, where Olympic banners drape nearly every balcony and cowbells echo off the Dolomites from morning to night, walking through the center of Milan during the Winter Games can feel almost shockingly ordinary.
Commuter traffic dominates the rhythm of the city. On weekday afternoons, the metro cars remain sparse until the familiar 5 to 7 p.m. rush, when office workers in bike helmets and wool coats pack into trains headed home.
In the park surrounding the Arco della Pace, joggers trace their usual loops through Parco Sempione. People walk their dogs and troubadours stand beneath leafless trees with a hat or guitar case at their feet.
But on the hour, every hour, the Olympic cauldron ignites and a massive crowd gathers in the park for the sound and light show. The park turns quiet in the crowd of hundreds, silent to the sound of “The Future (Olympia),” the unofficial Olympic anthem for the Milano Cortina Games. As the song ends, in the quiet between claps, a dog bark breaks the silence, sending the crowd into laughter as they disperse back toward dinner reservations, evening hockey games or the train home.
“Personally, it feels like an Eras Tour,” said Laura Sibony.
Laura was visiting Milan from Oregon with her best friend Allie Hughes and their moms, Linda Sibony and Shirley Hughes. The girls trip to Italy has felt just like being in the girls bathroom at Taylor Swift’s two-year-long global stadium tour, joked Laura, where everyone, stranger, athlete or friend, is there to support and celebrate each other as one big community.
“Like the entire city feels like a girl’s bathroom. You see other people wearing their national clothing, it’s so easy to strike up a conversation. There’s been a lot of pin trading,” said Laura.
She and Allie even packed themed friendship bracelets, a tradition of Taylor Swift fans, to swap with strangers.
“It just does feel like the world came here to be together and celebrate sports and their athletes,” Laura said.
Despite the host city being in a large urban center, where spectators and athletes are dispersed across the city, the group said the Olympics make the whole world feel like a small town.
In a city of more than a million people, she’s repeatedly run into the same fans on trains, in gelato shops and outside of venues.
“It makes you feel really embedded,” Allie said. “Like we’re not just here spectating. We’re just seeing athletes walking around like normal people.”
The group had seen the Team USA gear all over their social media feeds throughout the week, and so when they spotted an athlete wearing it in Milan, they stopped him and asked what sport he played.
Realizing they were speaking with Connor Hellebuyck, the goaltender for the U.S. men’s hockey team, just hours removed from a win over Germany that Sunday, they decided to return on Wednesday to watch him in the quarterfinals.
“This trip was always kind of a bucket list item,” said Laura. “I’m hooked. I want to do this every four years.”
Because the events were geographically split between the city and mountain clusters in Livigno and Cortina d’Ampezzo, many spectators simply picked their passion and committed to it. Travel between clusters can take anywhere from three to 18 hours by train and bus, depending on where you’re going. Some have rented cars to move between them in a day, and others accepted that they just wouldn’t see everything.
Laura, who grew up figure skating, said the decision to attend the Games in the Milan cluster was easy, and the group didn’t have the time to get around to more than the ice sports anyway.
“We’re mostly here to watch the medal events in hockey,” Shirley said. “We’re staying here in Milan because it was just a lot easier to plan and navigate. We really don’t have the time to get up to the mountains, and that’s OK.”
Milan is host to four of 16 total Olympic disciplines: ice hockey, figure skating, speed skating and short track. For those sports, the city has become a hub. Casa Italia glows in bright colors, rooftop DJs spin late into the night and national jerseys, primarily of the hockey variety, weave through the fan zones. The Olympic footprint is concentrated to the Milan Ice Park and fan zones pepper the nearly 40-minute walk from the Olympic Cauldron in the Arco Della Pace to the big tourist centers at Piazza del Duomo.
The stadium is far from the city in a town called Rho, similar to the distance between Salt Lake City and the Utah Olympic Oval in Kearns, but it is accessible via a full metro terminal that sits directly beneath the Fiera Rho convention center.
It’s a long ride west, but the metro makes it easy to move thousands of people in and out of the Rho arena in a short time, and while shuttle buses between downtown and Kearns can account for heavy traffic, the urban infrastructure of Milan facilitates the Olympic crowd with ease.
Traveling within the mountain cluster of Cortina d’Ampezzo, by comparison, lends itself to lots of buses winding through narrow alpine roads and spectators waiting in long lines as snow and fog undo the routes and event schedules. There, the Games have overtaken the small ski town, with Olympic chatter filling every café in languages from across continents. In Milan, spectators said, you can walk 30 minutes and forget the Olympics are even happening.
Gregory Hall came to Milan with his wife, Meghan, and their three daughters, Nyah, Raelen and Bayla, who recently moved to Barcelona, Spain, from Toronto, Ontario.
“Everything seems so spread out here. You’ll put your head down and you’re walking and kind of forget you’re in a town where the Olympics are,” said Gregory.
In Milan, the Olympics sit in the shadow of history. The cauldron burns beneath the arch of the Arco della Pace, and just beyond it rises the brick fortress walls of the Sforzesco Castle, the 15th-century castle once home to the dukes of Milan, which serves as the backdrop to the Olympic fan zone. The Olympic megastore has massive lines to get in for some Games merch day and night, and it sits directly in front of the Duomo di Milano.
The Olympic spirit remains alive in jerseys or pin trading, but hardly leaves a mark on the centuries old city.
For Nyah, Raelen and Bayla, pin trading has become a sport of its own, and the three proudly displayed their growing collection.
“I love the pins,” she said. “We’ve been trading these everywhere we can.”
Raelen added: “I have like 20 of them. We had no idea this was a thing. We met a guy, and he taught us how to trade.”
While there may be less opportunity to sport loud costumes or national gear outside of the stadiums, pins have become the common language.
“That’s the Olympics. The pins are great. These are like the ground zero of how people interact that aren’t athletes. To me, it’s a conversation starter,” said Meghan.
On Wednesday night in front of the Duomo, Milanese guitarists and accordion players gathered to sing classic Italian songs. Within minutes, a circle of locals formed around it to add to the chorus, clapping and swaying with each new song, and all of them knew it by heart.
Tourists filtered through the plaza from the surrounding restaurants passing glasses of wine down the line to friends and strangers. The musicians ranged from high schoolers to older men, and it was clear this wasn’t just for show, and it certainly wasn’t for the tourists. This was life in the community of Milan, a place that cannot be drowned out by the global voice of the Games.
“There’s definitely more of a city-wide engagement,” said Nyah. “And I think that the locals almost feel it more than the tourists, whereas, I presume in Cortina, it’s more secluded to the visitors. So I think getting the locals involved is really cool.”