October is coming to a close, and with it, the gray season is preparing to open. Milan, in all her complex beauty, is about to be revealed to those who love her in her most fitting attire: mist, rain, and cloud. This is her mantle, her signature, her color.

Despite sporting a range of palettes—ochres, olives and beiges—this old lady’s demeanor is reserved and elegant and best represented by that shade existing squarely between black and white. She has not maintained herself with plastic surgery, nor has she colored her fine hoary head. Every line, scar and callous are visible. Every architectural whim exercised during some past decade sits side by side with the whims of decades preceding and following it. But they all meld into the overall grayness of her. Even her shabbiness, her poverty, and her urban grit find their place in this color, her color—gray.

Both warm and cool, perfectly attuned to the uncertain morality of our times and to the natural complexity of things, gray appeals to her philosophical mind, and to her silent eye, which has seen so much: war, immigration, art, fashion, opera, injustice, progress…and the common Italian’s search for a better life.

Her gray, the color of equality if equality had a color, is the blanket that covers us all.