After almost three weeks of traveling, we had reached that point of any vacation in which we were very tired and had run out of clean laundry. And once again, as in 2003, we were ending our trip in Milan. The last city in a trip usually gets the short shrift, and knowing this, we tried to remain alert. We wanted to appreciate Milan.
We had had such nice hosts all through our trip that at first we felt a little at odds in this big, anonymous city. But being New Yorkers, we figured we could find our way around and entertain ourselves.
Because we were staying in the same hotel as on our previous trip, we already knew that we didn't want to have dinner that first night on the nearby Via Dante. We felt it was the Milanese equivalent of Times Square. So we asked the hotel clerk (a very kind girl whom we also remembered from our previous trip) where we should go. Once we got to the area she recommended, we still felt that the selection of restaurants was a little tourist-y (they were the kind where the waiters stand outside and try to get you to come in), but we finally selected one and found that the food was good, if expensive. We sat outdoors.
We had, unknowingly, chosen a restaurant on the street where the fortune tellers hang out. We had barely begun our meal when the first one set up her table. She was wearing a red dress, a red sequined shawl, a lot of make-up, and she had dyed-blonde hair. As groups of young people walked by, the women often dressed in shorts and heels, she would shout, "Ciao, ragazzi!" to get their attention. But the only two groups I saw stop at her table were both English-speaking, and the women were tall, pretty, young blondes. Can you guess what she told them?
There were also people walking their dogs, a toddler who wandered around the sidewalk near our table, and a man who kept trying to push a dozen roses on us. The rose-peddler was rather annoying, but on the whole, we enjoyed having some street life with our dinner. Bob got to use a new favorite get-rid-of-peddlers line that he had invented in
Sarzana: "Parlo solo cinese." It usually gets a laugh (being so obviously false), and sometimes it gets rid of the peddler.
Towards the end of our meal, we realized it was getting dark, but from the wrong direction. The wind picked up, and we heard rumbling. But we were already halfway through dessert, so it didn't concern us.
Besides, we were very entertained by the fortune teller. She seemed to be hedging her bets against the storm, removing first one chair from her table, then another and another, and stacking them against the nearest store front. By this time she had been joined by several other fortune-tellers, none of whom were doing much business in this threatening weather. They sat at their tables like so many flies gathering, all up and down the street, candles sputtering in the wind. Bob wondered aloud whether she could predict whether it was actually going to rain. The next moment, a gust blew out all her candles.
We finished our meal and set off towards the nearby Brera Quarter (in the opposite direction from our hotel) with our map, hoping to see La Scala lit up in the dark. We made it as far as the Chiesa di S. Marco and were once again getting our bearings when the wind picked up suddenly and blew whirling dust in our faces. Lightning flashed, and it became very obvious that it really was going to pour. We spat out leaf bits, laughing, and started to beat it back to the hotel. We did stop briefly, though, under a bar awning where a crowd was watching the final game of the World Cup. Bob poked his head in and looked towards the screen. "Zero/zero!" someone yelled out. The question didn't even need asking. On the way back by our restaurant, there were even more fortune-tellers. I noticed one in a bright orange dress with a large, green satin hat. She almost glowed in the shop lights.
We had barely walked through the fortress-like doors to our hotel when we heard the storm break with a fury. But we were safely inside. We sat in our glass hotel room, watching the constant lightning outside and the end of the World Cup on the hotel-room TV: "E' finita! L'Espagna e' la campiona del mondo per la prima volta!"
The next day, CZ and I wandered around in the heat while Bob went to meetings. Lots of things were closed, because it was Monday, but we familiarized ourselves with the Parco Sempione, the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele, and the Duomo.
CZ took the photos of the interior, the bronze relief, and the candles, above
Bob had been going to various meetings with potential Italian clients all along, but in Milan, this became more or less the primary purpose for the trip. After one of these meetings, he came back to the hotel with an interesting story: He had met a young woman from
Castelnuovo di Garfagnana who was perfectly fluent in both Italian and English. And the reason she spoke English so well was that she had spent her first eight years in Scotland--she was one of the
Scots-Italians.
This young woman, Tamara (pronounced Ta-MAH-ra), offered to meet us for dinner after work so she could show us an area of town she liked, and so we could trade impressions of Castelnuovo. We ended up walking to the
Navigli section, a student area in the southern part of town that reminded me somewhat of Greenwich Village. It was also the section of town that contained a lot of old canals that the Renaissance Milanese had once used to transport goods to the nearest river. Leonardo da Vinci had a hand in designing them. Now they made a nice excuse for a row of restaurants down either side.
We didn't have a particular restaurant in mind, but all of them looked better than the one we'd eaten in the night before, so we were happy. We ended up in one that had unusual takes on all the traditional Italian dishes. Tamara explained what it was like to grow up in Castelnuovo from the age of eight until she went back to college in the U.K. Yes, it was nice and cozy--maybe a little too cozy when you're a young single. She liked Milan better, though she knew that many people didn't. Tamara also said her native Scottish accent could be a little misleading, because every now and then while she was in college, she wouldn't understand some word, and people, not realizing that Italian was her first language, would simply think she was a little dense! It was fun to be able to get in-depth impressions from someone who knew so much of Italy.
By the time we walked home at around ten p.m., the whole district was teeming with students. They sat around S. Lorenzo delle Colonne, talking, smoking, and performing music. Once again I had that slightly confused, dislocated feeling that I'd had several times before in Italy. During the day, it seemd that the churches were overrun by tourists (of which I was one) and looked upon as places revenue. At night, they were places where people hung out. How did the Italians feel about them as churches?
Bob on his way to a meeting
On the next and last day of our trip, Tuesday, CZ and I each picked a sight we wanted to see. We spent the morning in the
Pinoteca della Brera, Milan's chief art museum. It was fun to see so many of the principal paintings from art history survey courses in person--Raphael's
The Marriage of the Virgin, Mantegna's
Dead Christ, Bellini's
Madonna and Child, Piero della Francesca's
Madonna and Child with Saints, and an enormous Veronese dinner scene with Mary anointing Jesus' feet. We sat for a long time just taking in all that was going on in that one painting.
In the afternoon, we went back to an archeological museum that we had visited in 2003. I was a little disappointed to find that CZ had no memory of it, but I think she actually enjoyed going there this time. She likes the idea that Italian cities have remains of their previous incarnations underneath, and that if you look closely you can puzzle out what's what. This particular museum is built over part of the late Roman city walls near the emperor Maximin's palace. One of the wall's towers had been incorporated into a church cloister, which was in turn bombed during WWII, and then partially turned into a museum with the church still extant next door. This church, S. Maurizio, wasn't even particularly famous, but it had very well-done frescoes. And out behind the museum we found an archeologist at work, digging in the yard of the cloister. And of course, every set of ruins has its cats,
who have been here all along. Once again, we were witnessing the continual layering that is Italy!
Frescoes by Bernardino Luini in the Chiesa di S. Maurizio, next to the museum.
A Roman sculpture from Caesarea Maritima.
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