Italy 2018: Nella Città

Today boded well. Nothing too stressful to start with; nothing booked until 2.30pm; a bit of walking in the city, but no traipsing unless we really, really wanted to. And we thought we might get an early start too. Some of this happened, but not all. It's been not a bad day overall.

The view from the bedroom. The towers on the right are

the same as our building.

Awoke at 8ish again, and we were out the door quite early. We had a cup of tea and a yogurt, but not a proper breakfast, as we had made time to do the Italian thing on the way to catching the bus. We wanted to try having breakfast standing up at the counter, because that's so common. Maybe that's why the coffee is served less hot than (our) normal here: so that you can just drink it and go.

The bus came as we approached the bus stop. It was about 9.15, so this again filled us with confidence that the day would go well: a nice early start, so no rushing for that 2.30 appointment. And we were still able to travel on yesterday's public transport Day Pass, as it is a 24-hour ticket, and we started it at 9.38 yesterday. So the bus wound round its route, taking perhaps a little longer than we had remembered to get to the airport stop along the way, until at a bus stop in the middle of some residential zone somewhere, the bus was turned off and the driver told us we were at the end. Hmm. That was unexpected. But the next bus leaving from that stop was going to the airport (albeit via our home stop) so we just hopped on that one while we thought things through. Would we get off at home and catch the proper bus (this time making the effort to check the destination on the front of the bus) or just continue to the end of the line, and change at the airport? We went to the airport, partly because we would get more for our money - it was still before 9.38 when we got on, so we were still on yesterday's ticket. And we were at the airport quite soon: I had thought that the route might take us through lots of suburbs, but no, just one or two. Hop off the bus, look for one going to Il Duomo... What? the bus we just got off now says it's going to Il Duomo!! Hop on again, and pretend that our previous tickets are still valid for the rest of the trip. In all, we'd actually only lost about 20 minutes from our nice early start, so it wasn't a disaster.

First on today's list was a bit of videoing time for Stephen. We went back to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuale, the up-market shopping arcade by the Duomo. Stephen went filming, I did a bit of shopping (outside the arcade) (no, not at Tiffany's) and we met up after 20 minutes. Then, and before and since then, we saw a lot of photo shoots. We've seen one or two others during the trip, but since arriving in Milan, we've seen maybe 10 - mostly just the model and two or three others, but sometimes with a bigger entourage. Milan Fashion Week was just a couple of weeks ago, and there's still some street decoration up in conjunction with that too. But I'm not finding Milan as pretentious as I had expected. I thought there would be a lot of Beautiful People here, but actually, many of them are Pretty Ordinary People. It's quite a relief, really.

Castle, main gate

From the Galleria, we wanted to visit the Castle. In the elevator lobby of this apartment building, on our floor, there is a copy of an old (18th, 19th century?) map of the city. There is a big empty block in the north-west, and I glanced at it and thought, "Oh, that's the Duomo and its piazza." But no, the Duomo and piazza are tiny on that map. The empty block was the castle and its grounds. The land is labelled "Piazza d'Armi" so the castle was the armoury. We saw it from a few blocks away and walked towards, and then through it. We didn't visit its museum, so I can't tell you much about it, but it is big, and there are piles of stone cannonballs inside, still ready and waiting. But I didn't take a photo, because I didn't think they were interesting enough at the time. I liked the moat (now dry.) I took a photo of the moat, but the three cats and two soccer balls now inhabiting it probably won't be visible.

Here's the moat. You can see the soccer balls,
after all, but not the cats

Now the grounds are a park, and it felt a lot like walking through Christchurch's Botanic Gardens. Lots of deciduous trees just starting to turn, (and yet also) dead leaves underfoot, sunny day, dappled light, joggers, people sitting, walking, kids playing... I saw an acorn for the first time in years. There aren't many oaks in Vietnam, and I haven't been in NZ in the autumn for ages.

Park behind the castle

We were now on our way to the Design Museum. It's a big, relatively new building, in the grounds of the castle, but we had to walk all the way around it, because the entrance is from the street. Fair enough, but if you approach it from the park, there are no signs to tell you where the entrance is. So we walked about 330 degrees around the fence, thinking that the entrance must be just ahead. Eventually it was. The museum had an exhibition on by a Korean artist that was okay. It's not work that made you (me) question life, the universe, and everything, but more made me ponder the effort and precision that went into the making of it. Is that what art is about - the artist just wants me to think about him/her?

The rest of the museum, though, had more about design itself: a few exhibits showing how industrial design is changing because commerce is being transformed by the internet, and then the main part of it was what you expect from a design museum in Italy: a line-up of classic Italian designs. Many of them, however, were either domestic or European classics; only a few were familiar to me. But they had some good, useful explanations in English. For example, the 3-wheeled Bubblecar (you know, the one whose whole front face opens up) was designed as a two-seater travelling sofa.

Teatro Alla Scala

Interior: four levels of boxes, then two levels of

gallery above.

We had lunch at the museum café (who charge 4Euros for the tiniest bottle of Coke you have ever seen) and walked back around the park for our 2.30. This was a tour of La Scala. We had hoped to go to a performance, and I brought a decent dress and shoes all this way just for the show. I tried to book tickets the other day, when it looked like there were just 2 left at about 50Euros each, but I couldn't get the payment to work. Then it came to a choice between having dinner with Filippo and Valentina again, or going to the opera, so I didn't try very hard to get tickets again. Instead, I booked these tickets for a tour. For a bit more than half the price of the show. If it had been a quarter of the price, it might have been worth it. As it was, we got a 5-minute look at the theatre from one of the boxes, then the guide explained a lot about the construction and recent renovation of the theatre using an interactive TV screen that most people could only see half of, and then we got a tour through the small museum. We got more out of the museum part than we would have otherwise, but this was not a 29Euro service.

After the hour-long tour was finished, we felt that we hadn't quite worn ourselves out completely, so we went shopping. Stephen wanted polo-shirts and shorts, and I wanted some clothes as well. Obviously the high-end brand-name shops were no good for us, but Filippo had suggested Corso Buenos Aires as being more ordinary, so we took a taxi there. First up when we got there, time for a coffee. Luckily, even though it's not normal for Italians to drink milky coffee after about 11am, they don't spit on you and throw you out if you order a cappuccino in the afternoon, so that's what we did. Refreshed, we set off down this shopping street. Unfortunately, Filippo's definition of 'ordinary' was not ours. These were mostly still brand name shops, just a different tier of brand. Guess, Diesel, Vans and their ilk don't particularly want us as customers, and the feeling is mutual, to tell the truth. These shops were for teenagers and just-finished-being-teenagers, and/or skinny people. We got close to buying some polo shirts, but the sizes were misleading, and the biggest were just a bit too small. For me, there was niente. There was about a kilometer of shops, and we got to the end and caught two buses home (consecutively, not simultaneously.) And for once there was no drama!

We still had a bit more left in us, so when we got off the bus at our neighbourhood shopping centre, since there were a few shops still open, we gave it one more effort for a few more shops. But no: again, nothing at all for me, and although a shop with a lovely helpful owner had polo shirts, she had nothing in Stephen's size.

So home at around 6pm. Valentina is picking us up at 7.45 to go out for dinner, with her partner, and all of Filippo's family.

...

And what a fabulous dinner that was! We went to a local restaurant that serves traditional Milanese dishes: polenta, veal, game... and I don't know what else. The restaurant was perhaps an old farmhouse, and the food, although professional, had a home-cooked air about it. Stephen and Valentina's appetisers of pumpkin risotto with truffles was delicious, according to all of us who had one bite, and they agreed; someone ordered the polenta dish to share, and they liked it (it was virtually the same recipe as the pizzoccheri that we had in Bellano - just polenta instead of pasta); and I had horsemeat for the first time. It was a cutlet, and from their description, (or maybe Valentina's translation), I thought it would be breaded and fried, like a schnitzel. "How would you like it cooked?" they asked, as if I could possibly know the answer. It turned out to be more like a steak, so medium-rare was the right answer. But it was pretty tough. It was a strong flavor, but fine to eat. The rarer pieces were actually better; the meat around the edge was perhaps a little over-cooked and too dry, so I left it in order to have room for dessert, which for me was tiramisu, and the others had various tarts. If you're wondering, the bill for 6 adults, all having a first course, three having a second course, four having dessert, plus two simple kids' meals, was just over 200Euros. Oh, and there was a carafe of a robust local red.