Milan — the new Dubai?

If you were to listen to Yahoo! Finance, The Guardian and several others this week, you could be forgiven for thinking that Dubai, unsettled by geopolitical unease and Donald Trump’s latest Middle Eastern theatrics, has quietly relocated to Brera. Is there any truth to this?

Crucially, Milan has not yet surrendered to the fully interchangeable global luxury aesthetic. There is still enough local texture — linguistic, social, architectural — to resist it.

Fortunately for those of us who live here, Milan still ranks relatively low on the lip-filler index of European cities. It has largely retained its identity through a curious combination of self-confidence and social opacity. The caricature, particularly among outsiders, is of a city populated by snobs and sciuras: elegant but closed, affluent but faintly suspicious of newcomers.

There is some truth in this. Milan is Italy’s most international city, yet it continues to attract accusations of being difficult to penetrate socially unless one arrives attached to luxury, fashion, finance — or simply enough money to sustain long afternoons in the city’s hotels and on Via Monte Napoleone.

And yet my own experience has been almost entirely the reverse.

London — or at least the London of native-born professionals — struck me as considerably more inhospitable when I lived there. Perhaps that was partly because I was Scottish, and visibly poorer. But there was also a hardness to the city’s social structure: a constant low-level calibration of status and usefulness.

Milan, by contrast, can appear closed from the outside while behaving surprisingly warmly once one commits to it properly. The city does not advertise itself aggressively, nor does it perform openness in the Anglo-American style. Instead, it rewards consistency, repetition and a certain patience. Relationships here tend to accumulate slowly rather than announce themselves immediately.

That distinction may explain why comparisons with Dubai feel slightly misplaced.

Dubai’s appeal has always been built around frictionless globalism: speed, visibility, convenience, tax efficiency. Milan offers something rather different. Its attraction lies precisely in the fact that it still feels rooted in itself.

The danger, of course, is that this balance is delicate.

If too much globally mobile wealth arrives too quickly, the city risks becoming what so many others already are: interchangeable, transactional and aesthetically flattened. The same cafés, the same wellness clinics, the same international accents discussing property over €28 salads.

Missing from much of the coverage, however, is the rather obvious point that one has to be earning an immense amount of money before an annual flat tax of €300,000 begins to look attractive.

For now, however, Milan still resists.

And perhaps that resistance is exactly what people are coming for.