Italo-Disco Under Cheese Racks, and the Drains Still Smell of Brine
In a disused factory in Lambrate, Lorenzo Baldovin plays synthesiser pop for eleven people in coats while forty years of salt water rises through the floor.
The floor warms up around eleven. Lorenzo Baldovin knows this the way a baker knows an oven. By then the first record is already playing, a twelve-inch from 1983 with a drum machine that sounds like someone knocking politely, and the heating pipes under the concrete have started to tick.
Then the drains breathe out. It is brine, thin and sour, with something sweet underneath it. Caseificio Ranza aged washed-rind cheese on this site until the late nineties. Nobody has made a wheel here in a generation, but the smell has not been told.
Above the dancefloor the old ageing racks still hang from the roof beams. They are iron, rusted to the orange of a traffic cone, with slats where the wheels once rested. Lorenzo bolted his speakers to them in 2023 and never took the cheese hooks off. A coat hangs from one. Nobody remembers whose.
It is a grey Milan morning, the kind where the sky sits on the rail yards like a lid. Eleven people are in the room. Some have come straight from night shifts, one is still in a hospital lanyard, and one has brought a flask. They dance slowly, the way you do when your shoes are damp.
Lorenzo plays the records Italy once made for a version of America that did not exist. The singers learned their English phonetically and sing it with total confidence. There is a song about a red convertible and a boy called Johnny who drives it into the sunset. The chorus rhymes "dream" with "machine" four times. In this room, at this hour, it is the saddest thing you have ever heard.
He plays it from a stool, with his coat on, one hand flat on the mixer as if it might drift off. He does not announce anything. He nods at people when a bassline arrives, like a man greeting neighbours on the stairs.
Around noon a man in a green anorak walks up to the booth and asks for the name of the song about the convertible. Lorenzo tells him. The man has no phone in his hand, so Lorenzo writes it on the back of his wrist with a marker he keeps for the crates.
The man looks at his wrist for a while. Behind him the drains give one last long breath of salt. He will wash his hands before lunch, and the song will go down the sink the same way the cheese did.
