Duomo, Milan
As I mentioned in my earlier post, four of us traveled to Italy for two weeks in late September-early October: me; my wife, Cindy; her sister, Nancy; and Nancy’s husband, Mike. When we first started to talk about our trip, we put together tentative lists of what we wanted to see and where we wanted to go, and tried to create a list of as many must-see sights that we could fit into a two-week visit, and developed an itinerary from there. One of the things I most wanted to do was to see an opera in Milan, because I like opera and I had the sense that the best opera in the world was at La Scala (Teatro alla Scala) in Milan.
I went to the La Scala website and found that during our tentative travel time, there was a performance of Donizetti’s “L’elisir d’amore” (The Elixir of Love) on September 25. Partly because of that, I think, and because the airfare was cheaper than flying into Rome, we chose to fly into and out of Milan. This worked out fine. Milan is a major airport and actually the largest airport in Italy, I think. (More on the opera below.)
So, we flew out of JFK on Emirates on Monday, Sept. 23, at 10:20 p.m. NY time. We flew through the night, and — it being an eight-hour flight, and Italy time being six hours later than NY time, we arrived just after noon the next day, Tuesday, Sept. 24. We had each checked one bag. So, by the time we collected our luggage and took a train from the airport to the main train station, a subway ride from there to a streetcar stop, and a streetcar ride from there to our Airbnb, much of the afternoon was gone.
(The streetcar, by the way, made an odd rhythmic whooshing sound, like the heartbeat you hear during a sonogram. “The streetcar sounds like an ultrasound,” said one of us — Cindy, I think.)
Canal, Milan
Footbridge over canal, near the St. Christopher church (background)
I had not known until about two weeks before our departure, from a guidebook I bought in the Barnes & Noble in Lewisburg, that Milan once had a substantial canal system and that a couple of the canals remain. (They were built to bring stone for the cathedral from the quarry.) By crazy coincidence, our Airbnb was in the canal neighborhood and our streetcar stop was near a small footbridge over the canal. The footbridge was just a few steps away from a little church named after St. Christopher (San Cristoforo sul Naviglio), which I guess was apt, since according to the legend St. Christopher carried the Christ child across a river. So the location of the church near a bridge is apt, I guess, and it’s also apt that Christopher is the patron saint of travelers.
St. Christopher mural
Just a few doors away from the St. Christopher church was the mural above, painted on the back wall of a building that looked like a warehouse. The luminous quality of the painting, and its separate sections, reminded me of a stained-glass window in a church, but it was only paint on a wall.
Gran Bar Watt 2
After we got settled in the apartment, we walked around the neighborhood near that church and later that evening (9/24) had dinner at the Gran Bar Watt 2, a small family-run restaurant on the ground-floor of our apartment building. (The entrance to our apartment was the big wooden door to the left of the green-and-white-striped awning.) We picked four dishes out of a case and they prepared them for us. The owner’s dad (we assume), a charming white-haired old guy who didn’t speak much English, served us and kept us entertained. I was wondering if the dishes were regional specialties, so I went over to the woman behind the counter and said: “The dishes we’re having — piatti regionale?” She said yes — from the Abruzzo region, if memory serves.
Spires and statues, Duomo, Milan
View from the roof of the Duomo, Milan
Galeria Vittorio Emanuele II, Milan
On Day 3, Sept. 25, we started our day with a visit to the Duomo. It was amazing, as I said in my first post. It sits like a gleaming wedding cake at one end of a large piazza. Named after the cathedral, it’s called the Piazza del Duomo (Cathedral Square.) It is huge — covers more than three U.S. football fields put together. It’s dominated by the Duomo, an archway leading to the Galeria Vittorio Emanuele II (a big arcade/shopping mall of high-end shops), and an equestrian statue of Victor Emanuel, and other buildings. La Scala is nearby, and in fact we had lunch that day right next to the opera, at the aptly named Bar Della Scala. We sat outside and had wine and sandwiches. My veggie sandwich there was actually not that impressive, but everybody else liked their choices, and every other bit of food we had in Italy was amazing.
We saw long lines outside the Duomo and went to the Duomo’s “Fast*Track” ticket office. We paid a little extra for the “fast track” tickets, I think, but we did not have to wait in a long line, and found ourselves actually walking on part of the cathedral roof, among the spires and statues. I’ve toured cathedrals before, but never had that kind of vantage point.
Opera poster
That evening we had dinner at a restaurant on the square, “Il Mercato del Duomo,” again sitting outside. The pigeons were fearless, even landing on unoccupied tables, but it was a great meal, and later we went to the opera. We were jammed into a tiny box that was five stories high and the seventh from the main stage, with no knee-room at all, directly across from a huge chandelier that hangs in the center of the hall. I enjoyed the opera a lot, despite the cramped seating and the need to swivel our heads pretty hard to the left. The singing was amazing. You can tell that the singers are *not* wearing microphones. The sound is all them, not amplified, not coming out of speakers in the auditorium. We could hear everything clearly, despite being so much higher than the stage and halfway to the back of the auditorium — those guys really know how to project! The big-hit aria of “L’Elisir d’Amore” is “Una furtiva lagrima” (“A furtive tear”) sung by the tenor about his lady love. Got a *big* round of applause and several enthusiastic “bravos” from the audience. I do have to say, though, that the stagecraft and costumes were not as good as I thought they would be. I expected to be blown away, but they were just OK. Cindy said the soldiers looked like Oompa Loompas, from the original “Willy Wonka” movie with Gene Wilder. That’s not too far off.
Fun fact: “L’Elisir d’Amore,” by Donizetti, had its world premiere in Milan in 1832. The comic opera (love story, happy ending) is in two acts, and took about two hours, so by the time we got back to the apartment, it was probably after 11 p.m. Had been a long day for us, but a good one. The next day, Thursday, Sept. 26, we left Milan and took a train to Venice ….
Wordnado 