Milan

Off to Italy, the land of free water!

Following our trip to Greece, we were home for only about four days to take care of some work responsibilities and to attend a nice going-away lunch that our department threw for us and our other American colleague, Andrew. We all received some lovely parting gifts, too - a CD of piano music by a Breton composer and sheet music for the recording for me; a Breton bowl, a Breton cookbook, and a kid's book about a Breton girl who moves to Paris for Lisa; and a lot of French movies on DVD for Andrew.

Then it was off for another trip, this time to northern Italy. Although I'd visited Florence when I studied in Rome in 2003, I'd never seen other parts of northern Italy, nor had Lisa, so we put together a trip to Milan, Bologna, Florence, and Venice. We got a good deal on plane tickets on a discount airline, EasyJet, that's similar to Southwest in the US in that you pay for all the food and there are no assigned seats. We flew from Paris to Milan and spent two nights and one full day there.

Galleria Vittore Emmanuele.

Milan is the financial and fashion capital of Italy and while we weren't staying near the main high-fashion shopping street, we did see plenty of well-dressed, clearly wealthy individuals. It was also quite chilly in Milan, colder (upper 60s, top) than we expected and had packed for. This meant we spent part of the day shopping for leggings for Lisa to wear under the skirt she brought. This improved our time quite drastically. Speaking of shopping, we saw the Galleria Vittore Emmanuele, one of the first "shopping malls," a huge multistory 19th-century covered arcade of stores.

The galleria is right next to the Duomo, or cathedral of Milan. It's the fourth biggest cathedral in the world and while it was started in the 14th century, the final touches were only added in the 20th century. This means it's a hodge-podge of different styles, which can either be ugly or fascinating depending on your point of view. The outside is full of spires and the inside seemed, to us at least, to be pretty similar to the Gothic churches we've seen in northern France.

Milan's Duomo (cathedral).

Duomo interior.

Sforza Castle.

The other huge sight in Milan is the Sforza Castle, residence of the Dukes of the Milan during the Renaissance. We wandered through the courtyards several times on our way to and from other parts of the city. It's a very impressive fortress with some of the thickest walls and biggest towers we've yet seen. We didn't pay to go to the museum inside the building so we can't tell you what that's like.

Unique angle of a busker.

Busker and float.

Outside of the castle was a busker. Lisa was quite fascinated because he took advantage of the spot by being in front of a float advertising for the Canary Islands. This made it look like he had a HUGE costume with him. We realized after a minute or two (well, Aaron just realized this after reading this paragraph that Lisa authored) that this was separate, but we were still impressed because he stood very still and regal. Lisa wanted a picture and refuses to photograph buskers without giving them some money, so we gave a euro. He then invited her to stand on the podium with him. This caused confusion because he indicated that she could have a picture taken, but she had the camera around her neck and (obviously to you readers) wasn't with the other guys in the crowd taking pictures. She thus took this close-up picture of him before hopping down, having her hand kissed, and scampered off slightly embarrassed because of the confusion. It was quite an enjoyable scene to witness.

Wedding at Saint Ambrose Basilica.

We also visited several smaller, off-the-beaten track places, too, that were more interesting to us than the Galleria, Duomo and castle. One was the Basilica of Saint Ambrose which houses the relics of Ambrose, a very influential church father and bishop of Milan in the fourth century. We couldn't really walk around because there was a big Italian wedding going on (it was a Saturday morning). All the tourists like us who had inadvertently stumbled into the church were crowded into the side aisle by the door watching the wedding! It seemed like quite a lovely ceremony (we still like ours better, though).

Nave of San Maurizio Church.

Choir of San Maurizio Church.

We also went to a fantastic church, San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore. From the outside, it looked like a non-descript Italian church, but inside every available inch of the wall and ceiling was covered in frescoes, most from the 14th and 15th centuries of landscapes and saints and scenes from the last of Christ. It was beautiful. It used to be a convent church so the whole place is divided in to - the main church for normal parishioners and a rear part behind a wall behind the altar for the nuns, connected by a small door. There were a couple grilles in the wall for the nuns to be able to see the officiating priest and receive the host during communion. We'd never seen anything like it.

A better idea of the San Maurizio frescoes (with Aaron in contemplation).

Another cool church we went to was Santa Maria presso San Satiro. It's a very small church and the cool thing about it is an optical effect done by the Renaissance architect Bramante in the late 15th century (he also designed St. Peter's in Rome). You see, the wall behind the altar is about three feet deep but he painted it in a perspectival way to make it look like there was a 30-foot long choir behind the altar. (Unfortunately, we couldn't take any pictures in the church, but here's one on Wikipedia.) There was an evening prayer service going on when we visited, so we stood at the back and stared at the wall and one of the guards noticed. He asked if we wanted to get up close, we said sure, and he lead us behind some columns where we could stand at the front of the church out of view of the worshipers. It was very nice of him to do that! Seeing the wall up close gave me a sense of vertigo; my eyes and brain couldn't process the disjunct between the reality of the wall and the perspective effect. That's when we knew it was time to leave!

Fantastic old car as we walked between sites.

We visited the main art museum in Milan, which has a few nice things, but the best part was the special exhibit on Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. The Milan museum owns a 12-volume, 1100 page set of his notes and they're in the process of unbinding the pages and cleaning them all for conservation. As part of that process, the museum is displaying 30 pages at a time, all dealing with a similar topic, for a period of three months each for the next five years. Right now, the topic is da Vinci's hypothetical flying machines and his notes on bird flight. It was pretty cool to see his original sketches for a parachute and mechanical wings for humans to wear. (Again, we couldn't take pictures, given the sensitive nature of the ink and paper - sorry we can't show them to you!)

Old style trams in Milan!

The last thing about Milan - we felt a 5.9 magnitude earthquake on our second night there. It happened at about four AM and woke us up. Only the bed really shook; we didn't see anything else move. When I woke up, I thought Lisa was shaking the bed for some reason! It was only when we got up in the morning and checked the internet that we discovered there'd been an earthquake centered about 150 miles away! Fortunately, there was no damage in Milan and we were fine. It was the first earthquake I've felt in quite a while - and I didn't even know it was one!