All puffed out: Milan’s new smoking laws cause a stir
New regulations in Italy’s most stylish city prevent smoking in public – but rules are made to be broken.
Sometimes over a drink with friends in Milan, both Italian and expat, conversation will turn to the “elasticity” of rules in the Bel Paese, a stretchiness comprising two distinct layers. The top one involves the definition of what the rule is in the first place: in Italy, it turns out that almost everything operates in a grey area, rather than being a clearly defined, hard-and-fast ordinance. A rule can be interpreted diversely according to whoever happens to be in charge that day, based on things such as whim or emotion. Almost everything, it turns out, is negotiable.
Once you’ve got over the hurdle of defining the law, there’s the second layer of whether you’re going to obey it, based largely on the calculation of how much chance there is of enforcement. A case in point? Everyone knows you’re not technically allowed to double park but, listen, you had to take your elderly grandparent to a doctor’s appointment and what kind of a cold-hearted traffic cop would you be to not understand that, anyway? As long as you put your hazard lights on, Milan is a forgiving place.
Which is why I had to chuckle when earlier this year a friend from Argentina sent me a link to an article in one of the South American nation’s daily’s, Página 12, with the headline, “Milan bans smoking in open-air spaces”. From a public relations point of view, the fact that the news had travelled thousands of kilometres meant the announcement was already doing its job.
The “ban” (note the quotation marks here) came into force at the start of this year and is a hardening of a law from 2021 restricting smoking in some public spaces. According to the new legislation, you can no longer smoke in any public areas, including the outdoor seating areas of bars and cafés, and on the street, if you can’t be more than 10 metres away from someone else. Failure to abide by the rules can lead to a fine of €40 to €240. But according to one report, in the first month only about 20 people had been fined, with police preferring “education” instead.
Skip forward to early spring and people are still smoking in bars and lighting up after they alight the Frecciarossa at Central Station. And I’m still making zigzags on pavements to avoid plumes of smoke on my morning runs. Trying to cut down on small-particle pollution in a city that often has very poor air quality is a noble cause. But I’m yet to see a billboard advert, strategically placed no-smoking sign or proactive enforcement to make me think that this is anything more than another chance for Italians to assess the malleability of the law. Up in smoke? Quite literally.
About the writer
Stocker is Monocle’s Europe editor at large, based in Milan since 2020. A law in his current hometown requires locals to smile constantly; he’s rarely in danger of breaking it.
