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When Francis travels to Italy's richest city on Saturday, he will drop in on one of its most socially disadvantaged neighborhoods, a vast tower block known as the "Case Bianche" – the White Houses.
Milan's dilapidated tower block known as "Case Bianche" which Pope Francis will visit on Saturday. (Fotogramma)
By Nicolas Senèze,Milan | Italy
Above all, residents of the Case Bianche are hoping for one thing when Pope Francis pays them a visit on Saturday: that the lifts don't break down again.
That's what happened a few months ago to Cardinal Angelo Scola when he visited the tower block in the eastern part of Milan. The city's archbishop had to use the stairs to reach the flat of an old lady on the top floor.
Cardinal Scola was so struck that when the pope said he wanted to start his visit to Milan in the suburbs, the dilapidated Case Bianche seemed like an obvious choice.
The building, in fact, is more gray than white. Social housing authorities have done a bit of touching up ahead of the pope's visit, with a lick of paint here and there in now unusually clean stairwells.
"But much more radical work is needed," says Don Augusto Bonora, the parish priest of San Galdino, the small church built at the foot of the housing complex in the 1970s.
In the bathroom of their small apartment, Anna and Luca point helplessly to a hole in the ceiling through which water flows from the flat upstairs.
"I've been calling ALER [the housing authority] for three years, but they're not doing anything," Anna laments.
A true local, Anna, a mother of two, remembers the original Case Bianche which lent their name to the complex. These small buildings were built in the 1930s to house the unemployed of the 1929 economic crisis and to relegate opponents of fascist regime away from the city center.
Four decades later the structures had become unhealthy so they were torn down and replaced by the block that is now falling into disrepair itself.
All that remains of the district's original features is the small altar of the Virgin of Lourdes where the Pope will go on Saturday.
"It was in the courtyard of my house," recalls Anna of a time when there was a real spirit of community in the neighborhood.
"The old ones are dead, the younger ones got married and left. Everything has gradually deteriorated," says Luca. For her, the pope's visit to a district where 20 % of the population are immigrants is more important that if a president were coming.
"ALER has let us down and the politicians are not interested in us. Only the Church has stood by us," he adds, explaining how a succession of parish priests kept close ties with local residents.
There was Don Giuseppe, "who married us" and Don Giancarlo who "helped me to find my way in life and taught me the value of work".
As soon as the neighborhood was built in the 1930s, the Church had wanted there to be a parish. Even today San Galdino devotes a lot of attention to Case Biahche, from food aid to visiting the elderly through to active support for children and young people.
It's residents feel quite isolated from the rest of Italy's economic capital.
"For us, the pope is coming partly to unity our neighborhood with the rest of the city, to tell us that we are not excluded," says Luca.
"Milan summarizes the classic ambivalence of cities," says Luciano Gualzetti, director of Caritas Ambrosiano, a charitable arm of the Milan diocese.
"It's a city with many facets, people who live in relative security, but there are also major unemployment problems, many seniors living alone.
"Those who do not have opportunities remain at the margins, they are not taken into account by the politicians… Our work is, therefore, to bring them out of invisibility by offering each comprehensive assistance to break out of poverty," adds Gualzetti.
At the beginning of the Jubilee Year, the diocese found that there were 5,000 empty dwellings in Milan, while 29,000 people were waiting to be housed.
"We worked with the city and, [with the tax payment Italians are allowed to allocate to the church of their choice] we started to rebuild 55 [houses]," explains Gualzetti.
Since this was a response to a Jubilee appeal by the pope, Francis himself will hand over the keys to the first new tenants on Saturday.
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