City dwellers here yearning for a stretch of greenery can strike out to Milan’s Parco Nord, but if they rely on a map posted in metro stations around the city, they’ll end up more than six miles away.
The map, showing Milan’s 800,000 commuters the trains and buses they can use, puts the huge swathe of fields and housing to the north of neighbouring town Monza, home to the Formula One motor racing circuit.
But the park is in fact south of Monza, separating the town from Milan.
“We’re trying to work out how it happened,” said a spokesman for ATM, the company that runs Milan’s public transport, adding that it does not print the maps itself.
In an age of satellite positioning, the map mistake is particularly embarrassing for Italy, home country of Amerigo Vespucci, the transatlantic navigator and map-drawer who gave his name to the new world in the 16th century.
“Losing an area about 120 times as big as the San Siro (soccer stadium) really is stupid,” said Massimo Cantella, a lunch-time commuter who admitted he had never noticed the mistake before.
