Not a monument, not a statue, not a street. Milan has chosen a flowerbed to remember Ornella Vanoni. A portion of urban greenery, discreet and everyday, placed in largo Greppi, in front of the Piccolo Teatro Strehler. It is there that Jan. 18 the memorial plaque dedicated to the singer will be unveiled, fulfilling a wish she herself had expressed: to leave her city a living, traversable space, exposed to time.
The news, confirmed by the city and publicly anticipated by Fabio Fazio, has a value that goes beyond a tribute to a great interpreter of Italian music. The choice of a flowerbed, in a city struggling to gain meters of permeable soil and shade, introduces a concrete reflection on how memory is constructed in urban space. Not something to look at, but something to inhabit.
Largo Greppi is not a random place. It overlooks the Piccolo Teatro Strehler, which for Vanoni was not just a stage, but a point of origin. Here, in the early 1950s, her artistic and human formation took shape. On April 13, 1957, she made her debut in Federico Zardi’s play I giacobini, directed by Giorgio Strehler: she was entrusted with the revolutionary songs, her first real public appearance. A bond that will never be broken.
The flowerbed dedicated to Vanoni thus becomes a layered urban sign: it tells a biography, but also an idea of the city. At a time when public space is often reduced to a passing surface or shop window, the decision to name a green area takes on political significance in the most concrete sense of the term. It is a stance on what deserves to remain and how to do it.
The ceremony will be broadcast live during the special episode of Che tempo che fa, entitled Ornella senza fine. Unveiling the plaque will be Mayor Giuseppe Sala, Culture Councillor Tommaso Sacchi and Piccolo Teatro directors Lanfranco Li Cauli and Claudio Longhi. This is the first official tribute promoted by the City of Milan to the artist, in collaboration with the theater.
But the most interesting aspect is not the event, but what remains afterwards. A flowerbed is maintenance, seasonality, care. It is not eternal by definition: it lives if someone takes care of it. Naming a green space means accepting that memory is not fixed, but depends on daily choices, just like the urban environment.
In this sense, Ornella Vanoni’s flowerbed also speaks to the present. It says that remembering does not imply occupying space, but giving it back. And that greenery, in the city, can be a silent archive: it does not preserve objects, but relationships between people, places and time.
