I was through customs at Malpensa (does that mean “bad thought,” like “bad idea?”) and on my way into town to Stazione Centrale by 9:30 a.m., having decided to go ahead and take care of my prenotazione for Venice and buying metro tickets as I arrived. Took a cab from Centrale to my hotel with a very friendly and flirtatious middle-aged driver who wanted to talk about Bush and why he is evil. My minimal Italian is further addled by lack of sleep, so my contribution consisted of lots of, “Si, si, certo.” I seem to start most sentences with dispiaci.
Very nice and handsome desk clerk said he was very pleased I was early and that he was happy to give me my room, a tiny one on the fourth floor, but one with a huge bathtub and windows that open over a pleasant pedestrianized area. I shook out my clothes and hung them up and got out of my wallowed-in airplane jeans and hung them in the window to air. Then I took a blessed long, cool bath, put on a fresh face, and struck out walking.
I’ve forgotten my way around Milano in the nine years since I last visited, so I just wandered aimlessly. First impression: Dio Mio! These Milanese are unbelievably stylish and gorgeous! The businessmen are swoon-worthy and the women look like porn stars or fashion models. Everything in the window displays is gorgeous and worth coveting.
Went to the Duomo, which is currently shrouded in scaffolding and wire mesh during its renovation. La Scala is also under renovation. Europe is totally falling apart!
Strolled the Vittorio Emanuele arcade (reputed to be the first shopping mall, but is that true? What about the passages in Paris?) and went in a bookstore with gorgeously designed paperback novels that would be so great for using to make art installations, Euro 7 each. Affordable, but no space in my luggage for them, since I travel with only a carry-on bag!
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I always feel really rattled trying to get dressed to go out in Italy because I’m used to being thought the resident style maven back home -- but I can’t hold a birthday cake candle to the Italians here. I’ll think I’m doing okay – blond hair gets head-turns and smiles – but I have to fight feeling inferior and less well put-together than the locals constantly. Heels are really not that bad to walk in here in Milan because of all the sidewalks. All the Milanese women seem to wear tall, pointy stilettos and are permanently attached at the ear to their cell phones. I love the fact that all these beautiful people are smoking all the time.
Food is always a problem. I refuse to use perfectly good shopping money to eat in sit-down restaurants. Plus, as a woman dining alone, I don’t particularly appreciate every single man who works in the kitchen or washes dishes feeling it's necessary that they come out and gawk at me or attempt to chat me up. At 6:00 p.m. I just grabbed a quick spinach focaccia from a bakery. Bar food is also a good option when it starts to be brought along automatically with aperitivos late in the afternoon. Lunch for me is usually a gelato.
The weirdest thing that happens to me here in Italy is guys in their twenties saying, “Ciao, bella,” to me as I pass them in the street. Back home, I’m invisible to young men and they never flirt with me. I really like the burst of male attention Italy provides, I must admit. It’s like a testosterone injection. My ego must need it, since I’m single and frequently feel unloved and undesired. Free hormone therapy!
Must fade now – falling asleep as I write.
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What a long day! It’s 8:15 p.m. now and I have been walking nearly constantly since 9:00 this morning. Let’s see if I can even remember it all.
Breakfast downstairs in a non-descript breakfast room in the basement. Coffee a little greenish, but tasted fine. Served by ancient, smiling waiter. Then to try to get my Vienna prenotazione at a nearby travel agency the desk clerk directed me to; no luck. Must go back to Stazione Centrale, the travel agent says. Sigh. I already know that’s not true because yesterday the station agent told me to wait and do it in Venice, or go to a travel agent. Makes me nervous. I’m such an American, wanting all these details nailed down days or weeks in advance.
Back to the Duomo to go inside this time. Saw a priest reading a newspaper while waiting in the confessional for someone to arrive who needed to confess. Saw the skeletal mummy of some saint or cardinal in a chapel crypt. Saw droves of Japanese tourists. Then, took off for the designer area as its boutiques opened. It takes my breath away just to see the names on the signs: Hermés, Prada, Gucci, Versace! Everything in the fashion area is elegantly understated and the streets are really little more than alleys with limited automobile traffic. Went to Sermoneta and bought Natasha pairs of pink and light blue fingerless kid gloves and me a pair of oxblood red driving gloves. Very, very beautiful gloves, available in every one of the crayons inside a 64-color Crayola box. I could spend a fortune there.
Window licked for a couple of hours, but lack the balls to go into designer ateliers, knowing I can’t buy. Looked for the ubiquitous Hermès scarf knock-offs I always try to snag in Europe. Found a good copy as a gift for my assistant. Came back to hotel to try to call my business contact at noon. I swear, I can never operate a hotel room phone in Italy properly. I don’t dial all those numbers quickly enough and so the line goes dead, or else my eardrums are assailed with various strange electronic beeps and flutter tones that I can't decipher.
After a short rest I set out again for the Ambrosiana. Some really nice late Gothic paintings there, and I find it unbelievable how those Renaissance painters managed to render cellulite on putti and made the whites of their eyes gleam! The collection was rather confusingly organized and all over the place historically, but interesting. The Caravaggio still life with grapes is probably the most famous painting there. When I was getting ready to leave the middle-aged museum guard came up to speak to me. He asked me, “Must you leave me so soon? My heart is breaking.” He made me laugh and we spoke in half-English, half-Italian. He inquired where I was from, refused to believe I was an American and said I had the face of an angel. In a second he had managed to get my hand into his. Then he kissed it in two places. I acted embarrassed and said, “Ciao! Grazia!” and left. Then, at the exit door, another museum guard called, “Goodbye, very beautiful lady” to me in Italian. See? This is how Italy and the States are so different. In the U.S. museum guards would get fired for harassing the public! I can’t complain, not at all. I’m not at all offended. I cannot believe what fans of women these Italian men are. And I don’t think for an instant they truly believe they are really going to get anywhere with all their funny flattery. It's just an accepted form of social interchange here.
After the Ambrosiana I just wandered and slowly became lost – sta bene – walking in alleys, looking up at lofts and flats. Found a district with plumbing supplies and drapery rods and tassels. Found what must once have been a castle, only walls now, windows boarded, grass growing on its roof. Milan actually does have some great residential streets with apartment buildings with grand architectural decorations. Stumbled upon Teatro Litta entirely by accident.
Walked back through Piazzo del Duomo late in the day and peopled watched. Came back to the hotel, took a long bath, dressed and headed to the bar next to the hotel for a Campari and free nibbles (chips, pistachios, open-faced sandwiches) to call dinner. A grandmother with her two grandchildren stopped in the bar and all the waiters came out to caress the face of the smaller one in his stroller. They tenderly stroked down his forehead to his cheeks, a sweet gesture I’ve never seen before. It was quite touching to me. I wonder if Italian fathers are commonly so loving and demonstrative?
I strolled around then and watched people rush for buses to go home from work. The downtown streets become fairly deserted by early evening, especially the banking district. The workers must live farther out, although I do see plenty of flats above storefronts and office spaces here in the central area of Milan.
I begin to see the Milanese style is not so much the clothes they wear but the way they put it all put together with shoes, bag, sunglasses and jacket. The clothes are really not so different from what’s available in the States, although perhaps Italians are more body-conscious. And the shoes! The high, pointy shoes!
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Woke up at 6:00 after having slept like a stone after all that walking. Went to the bar next door for cornetto and cappuccino before striking off to the metro to get to the neighborhood where I have a business appointment. Spent a pleasant day seeing the study abroad program quartered in Cadorna. Walked blocks to see student apartment accommodations scattered about, and at one point walked through a park with a public swimming pool where naked people lay outside tanning. Not just topless, but stark naked. And no waxing – au naturale. Yay!
Just at the time I was getting ready to depart, Roberto, the center’s director, blew in. He’s also director of a music academy so he invited me to hear a concert some of his students were giving at the Verdi Foundation, the space where Verdi’s buried in a crypt in the palazzo’s chapel with his lover. I accepted his invitation and we sped across town in rush-hour traffic in Roberto's Fiat. Fondazione Verdi: incredibly gorgeous music room, painted ceilings, arabesque motives on the glassed-in book shelves, illusionistic green painted draperies with gold leaf decorations, squeaky wood parquet floors and to-die-for lipstick red leather slipper chairs for the audience. Damn! These Italians know how to do everything visual right!
The concert was to benefit the retired La Scala musicians, who Roberto warned me are all old and deaf and often hum along or call out the mistakes of the musicians. We arrived late, in the middle of the second movement of a Beethoven concerto. I thought the young musicians were very competent and sounded great acoustically in the intimate hall. At the end, when the old man in front of me rose to leave, he turned and smiled at me and bowed.
Attending the lovely concert also gave me the opportunity to experience my first trip ever in a private car in Italy. I see how they do it now – they don’t really have a plan or know which streets connect or go where – they just try to get from Point A to Point B as the crow flies and see if they can get away with it -- all, of course, at high speed and barely stopping at intersections and traffic lights. No wonder it always seems as if you’re going to be run over here!
Oh! And I meant to write that yesterday in Via Spiga I gave a beggar a Euro because he played a beautiful, haunting melody on his melodica.
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I had the strangest dream just now before I awoke: that my mother was kissing my face tenderly with caresses of my head and face as I see Italians do with children, and she was murmuring sweet things to me. God! I hope she’s all right! I wonder what this means? How strange!
Up early and out, first to go back to the Duomo because I like to go in churches in the early morning when the real parishioners are praying. Then to take a photograph of La Scala’s renovation and the huge Versace billboard beside it. Then down Via Verdi toward the Brera, past all the bars and cafes and art supply stores catering to the art students. Then to the Brera, which was free because some kind of Italian Culture Week is going on. I stayed three hours or so, enjoying the Gothic and early Renaissance works with their pictorial flatness the most. I really only remember being struck by the Mantegna dead, foreshortened Christ last time I was at La Brera.
Then I hiked up to Castello Sforza. I am such an idiot. I thought I was lost, so I asked a flower seller, “Dovè castello?” and he points at the castle parapets visible just over the treetops. Duh. I evidently entered it at an entrance other than the main one with a moat and a drawbridge and the wheels and mechanisms and chains necessary to draw it up visible. I soaked my pounding feet in a fountain in the courtyard, then enjoyed looking around inside the castle. It’s like a fairy tale castle, huge, cool, with tiny windows up high. Explored a wonderful collection of antique musical instruments: virginals, piano forte, harpsichords and saw the piano Verdi used at some hotel he lived at and autographed. Violins, cellos, guitars, lutes, beautifully installed. Quickly browsed through ivory and ceramics collections.
On the way back to the hotel I went back to the shops behind Vittorio Emanuele to purchase those tiny weave, suntan-colored fishnet stockings Italian women wear in summer. Found a bargain: buy three pair, get two free! I’ll be fixed up for years to come!
Now I need to pack and prepare to depart for Venice tomorrow. It’s nearly goodbye again to Milan, and to all I saw here:
Tight white jackets over jeans on women;
impeccably tailored businessmen uninhibitedly picking their noses and scratching their crotches in public;
nuns picking their noses;
children in the Brera being taught about a genre painting while a really flagrant Magdalene displayed herself in all her naked glory on the wall opposite;
the Liberty of London Ianthe pattern upholstery on the couches in the lobby of my hotel;
exquisite marzipan fruits displayed in a shop window, wedding sweets in colored net bags with tiny flowers;
Missoni towels for sale in the department stores;
as many pairs of sunglasses per capita as churches;
young people wearing t-shirts with non-sensical English sayings emblazoned upon them: “bad party,” “1% attitude,” “horizontal boxer,” “true love = hot date with new man.”
