Sorry to hijack this great thread, but I meant to come back with a response to this...
what makes the core of Milan so conservative? I know Berlusconi was a big man there, but it's gotta be more than that right? What's the class/income/education profile?
Rather affluent. The historic tendency in Milan was for industry to develop around what was then the edge of the metropolis - Sesto San Giovanni is a particularly well known example, but some areas within the municipality as well - with the centre being more bourgeois, with banking and finance being important. Every large Italian city has a totally different character.
Just to illustrate that this core-periphery split was quite common, if not pervasive, here's the support for left-wing forces in north-central Italy in 1948, namely the PCI-PSI pact, the PSI dissidents around Giuseppe Saragat, and the peasants' party, who only ran in the fringes of the region depicted, and performed poorly even there. The left forces often did a lot better in peripheral towns and even rural areas of the red belt, whereas the cities were home to at least a modicum of DC support.
