We have made a complete 360 degree turn from Copenhagen to Milano, Italy. Within our first half day, we'd already seen a mozzerati parked outside our restaurant and and ferrari outside the dealership. Bruce is in awe of this town. He's already visited the Mercedes store.
Milano is Italy's fashion, industrial, banking, TV, publishing, and convention capital. For every church in Rome, there is a bank in Milano. Our hotel is two blocks from the Galleria, where the rich of the rich shop, known as Italy's Rodeo Drive...only bigger.
Actually, big is not a good word to describe anything around here. More like gigantic or Bruce uses the word sequoia-size. Everything is simply massive.
We only have one day here so we took a 3-1/2 hour tour to get in the highlights. We're both now information overloaded.
The Galleria is a four-story glass-doomed arcade and is the symbol of Milano. It is made of iron and glass and was the first building in town to have electric lighting. Besides being a shopping gallery, it is also full of art. (Of course, this is Italy...!) Around the central dome, patriotic mosaics symbolizes the four major continents, a white cross in the center represents the king and the she-wolf facing south toward Rome honors that city, since 1870, has been the national capital.
On the west side (facing Torino) is that city's symbol, a torino (little bull). Torino was Italy's provisional capital from 1861-1865.
Notice the worn out tiles where the bulls testicles would be. For good luck, locals step on his irresistible little testicles but it works better if you spin two times, and it must be clockwise. With so much spinning, the mosaic is replaced every few years.
The city's centerpiece is the Duomo (cathedral) which is the world's fourth-largest church in Europe (after the Vatican's, London's, and Seville's). Construction of this cathedral lasted from 1386-1810. It is made completely of marble, from top to bottom.
It has more than two thousand statues inside and another thousand outside. Inside, are 52 one-hundred-foot-tall, sequoia-size pillars representing the weeks of the year and the liturgical calendar.
The baptism area uses a basin that was found buried and is from 200 A.D. Can you imagine taking a bath in this bathtub knowing that emperors bathed in it?
You can also go up on the roof of the Duomo and walk around. Nice views up here.
A famous statue inside the Duomo is the Bartolomeo Statue sculptured by a student of Leonardo Di Vinci of St. Bartolomeo, an apostle and first-century martyr skinned alive by the Romans.
This was done in the 16th-century and shows the poor guy wearing his own skin like a robe. The alter area is still used for daily masses. Napoleon crowned himself king of Italy under this dome in 1805.
I liked the floor that was made of marble from 3 different areas of Italy.
The next stop on our tour of Milano was the famous La Scala Opera House and Museum. Opera is very popular in Milano and they take it very seriously.
The stage of this opera house is as big as the seating area on the ground floor.
The massive chandelier is made of Bohemian crystal.
The lobby is quite beautiful, too, and it was nice walking around imagining all the high fashioned Milanese enjoying their night at the opera.
We just did a quick walk through of the museum of various musical artifacts
and famous Italian opera singers and musicians.
Milan's leading family, the Sforzas, hired Leonardo in 1495 to decorate the dining hall of the Dominican monastery that adjoins the church.
They only let 25 people in at a time and you must first dehumidify by going through several rooms before entering. They only allow 900 visitors per day and you can only stay for 15 minutes; all this for minimizing damage to the painting. The room depicted in the painting seems like an architectural extension of the church. A door was cut out in that wall of the monastery in 1652 so Jesus's feet are no longer there. Leonardo Di Vinci lived in Milano for 25 years and considered it his residence working for the Sforza family. After our tour was over, we headed for lunch which was my favorite part of the day, of course. We were hot and sweaty since it was 83 degrees in Milano and immediately asked for water since water isn't automatically provided to you as a beverage in Italy.
We picked a family-owned restaurant called Antica Osteria Milanese that served Milanese favorites.
We soon figured out that mostly locals come here because we felt like the only "tourists". By the looks of it, this is where lots of businessmen come for lunch so it must be a good place. All the businessmen were dressed extremely well, Milano-style.
We only saw four people running the show, a grandma, a man, a woman (his wife) and a young girl - or in other words, the family that runs the place. And none of them spoke English.
They were all doing the serving and various other tasks, constantly bustling around.
I think the owner knew a lot of the businessmen because he visited with some of them who were probably regulars.
I'm not sure what I enjoyed most - eating or watching the people. Bruce and I actually split everything we ordered so we could try lots of things. The first course was the pasta with meat sauce, simple but tasty.
Second course was a green salad since we realized we haven't eaten a salad in over a week. It was all very fresh and tasted so good.
The man brought our salad and then hurriedly grab a bottle of olive oil from another table and put it down on our table for our dressing. That was pretty simple. We were also using olive oil for our bread, as well.
Our third course was some roasted vegetables that were super good. There were some roasted eggplant, zucchini and yellow bell peppers. You can tell we are just craving simple food now after all our eating out.
Our main entree was a pork cutlet. I'd never seen this kind before because it was flat yet it still had the bone in it.
It tasted like wienerschnitzel (which was probably on my mind since Bruce had this at Tivoli Gardens). It was good but I got full after just a few pieces. We were saving room for dessert so Bruce ordered an affogato which is ice cream and coffee. In the U.S., these look like root beer floats but this one was very different and so good that Bruce ate it so fast I hardly got to taste it!
The vanilla ice cream had some crunchy stuff on it and the coffee was so rich and smooth, it was unbelievable. I ordered a cake called Meneghina all griglia with Grand Marnier, a typical toasted Milanese cake.
It was like a toasted sponge cake, heavy with Grand Marnier, especially in the middle, sort of crisp on the outer edges. Delicious. We were both happy with our desserts. We paid our bill and thanked our hosts. We told them how much we enjoyed our visit and our meal.
I don't think they understood a word we said but I think the point got across to them. They were a delightful family and it was a pleasure to be able to experience their restaurant. It was a good day in Milano.
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