Milan. A proclamation is circulating from a young engineer and physics professor, Giovanni Cantoni, a frequent visitor to the Duomo café, a Jewish family with Mazzinian sympathies. The proclamation recalls the American War of Independence and their abstention from buying tea, and calls on Milanese to abstain from smoking tobacco. The proclamation is successful. Austria collects taxes from Lombardy equivalent to €300 million today, a considerable portion of which comes from tobacco (€15 million in Milan alone). These revenues have doubled in the last thirty years, thanks to Milan’s growing prosperity. This represents a quarter of all taxes collected by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, despite Lombardy being a small fraction of the Empire’s population and territory.
