The Upper Room

Stained glass in the Duomo

Milan (week 34)

After climbing out of the coastal mountains of Liguria, the plains of Lombardy open out like the farmlands of southwestern Ontario.  We stopped for a day in Milan, the second largest city in Italy and, like Genoa, a former capital city full of treasures too numerous to see in a day.  We started our day at 7:45 am, catching the train from our suburban hotel to the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie.  The refectory contains Leonardo Da Vinci's Il Cenacolo (the Upper Room), better known in English as "The Last Supper".  Visits are in small groups (25?) for 15 minutes, and most times are booked months in advance, thus the 9am time for us, having only booked 2 weeks ahead.  Almost none of Leonardo's actual work remains (i.e. paint that he applied himself) because he used an experimental dry paint technique that was very fragile and started falling off as soon as he was finished.  Even with the extensive restoration, the remaining painting is missing much of the detail that you can see in canvas reproductions made in Leonardo's day.  Of course, no pictures of any kind are allowed, so you'll have to check online images to see what it looks like now.

on the roof

After popping into the convent's Basilica, we then proceeded to Milan's second-most famous religious site: the Duomo di Milano, or more formally, the Basilica cattedrale metropolitana di Santa Maria Nascente.  Mark Twain described it thus: "They say that the Cathedral of Milan is second only to St. Peter's at Rome. I cannot understand how it can be second to anything made by human hands."  On the other hand, Oscar Wilde was not impressed (then again, did he like anything?): "The Cathedral is an awful failure. Outside the design is monstrous and inartistic....everything is vile in it."  The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between.  Depending on how you measure it, the Duomo is the 5th-largest church in the world.  It is a vast, open space on the inside, because the chapels simply line the walls instead of being recessed into cubbyholes.  The variety of stained glass is fascinating, covering a variety of styles and colours.  We ascended to the roof as well, to get a closer look at the hundreds (thousands?) of carvings, statues, and gargoyles covering the spires.  Unfortunately the day was quite hazy, so we could not really enjoy the view over the city.

Piazza del Castello with the Castello Sforzesco in the background

Back to the ground, we proceeded through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (you know you're in Milan when an intersection has two Prada stores on opposite corners), up the Via Dante to the Castello Sforzesco.  The town's main fortification was originally built starting from 1358, eventually expanding to a star-shaped citadel.  It is now home to numerous museums (ranging from Renaissance art to Egyptian artifacts) and a colony of cats in the moat.  Backtracking towards the Duomo, our last stop was the Teatro alla Scala, unassuming on the outside but ornate in the interior as befitting Milan's opera house.  It has a small museum inside, and normally you can tour the theatre.  On this day tours were not allowed but we got to see something better: rehearsals for the upcoming Cello Suites (In den Winden im Nichts), featuring Bach's music with interpretive dance.