Following the trend of opinion after returning from a side-trip, I feel as though I am obligated to say: it’s good to be back in Lyon. It really, really is.
Milan was beautiful – probably my favorite city of the ones we’ve visited so far (even coming close to Lyon). Our hotel was within five minutes from the Milano Centrale train station and in the business district, giving us a taste of something we don’t really see in our part of Lyon: tall, well designed office buildings; long and large avenues; and roundabouts featuring parks, gardens, and statues. I’m not sure how old Milan is as a city – 600 years old at least – and we didn’t go much beyond the business district and the major tourist zones, but the city as a whole seems much more spread out, much less compact than some of the old cities we’ve been to in France (Paris and Lyon namely). Never once did we see a grocery store, though I’m sure they’re there, hidden somewhere in the city. The architecture was stunning as well, with even some of the newer-looking buildings featuring carved murals (I don’t actually know the proper term for what they were), pillars, and pretty amazing statues. We passed no fewer than three old palaces-turned-government buildings on our walk from our hotel to the Duomo.
Speaking our hotel, I suppose I should give a brief description of our very swanky, 4 star lodgings. Alex and I had decided early on that we wanted Milan to be our splurge trip, the brief getaway where we stayed in a nice place and didn’t really care how much we spent on dinner. The Hotel Prime Mythos fit the bill perfectly, featuring an automatic rotating door (once you stepped into it, it would start moving – so cool), an English-speaking staff, rich red carpeting, chandeliers, and free Wi-Fi. Our room was beautiful, only slightly smaller than our entire apartment, with air conditioning and a nice balcony. The bathroom was interesting (I’ll leave Alex to talk about our bidet), and I have to say it was nice not to have to lean down in the shower for once. One of the coolest parts of our hotel room wasn’t actually the room itself, but the key to it. Most of us have been to a hotel that uses an electronic key, the type that you swipe in the lock in order to open the door. Well, this room had an electronic key, but instead of swiping it, you simply waved it in front of the lock, which immediately opened the door and turned on the light in the little hall that connected the bathroom to the bedroom. After entering the room, you immediately stuck the key into a slot outside of the bathroom, which then turned on the lights in the bedroom and then enabled you to turn on the lights in the bathroom and elsewhere. You could turn the lights on and off at you pleased, but you had to have the key inserted. When you left, you pulled the key out of the slot, which turned off the other lights, but turned on the one in the hall again – it was an amazingly innovative way of ensuring that guests didn’t use up too much electricity by leaving a lamp or a light on when they left.
We weren’t in Milan for a particularly long time: we arrived late in the day the evening of the 5th, had all of the 6th, and then were out of the city by noon on the 7th. Still, we managed to get a lot done the one full day that we were there, satisfying all of our tourist/sightseeing obligations in one fell, efficient, swoop. We woke up early (!) Wednesday morning and had breakfast at a café we passed on our way to our first destination: the Duomo. Hoping to save money on travel as well as see some of the city, we walked for about 30 minutes (not including the times when we got turned around by the somewhat obscure Italian system known as “street signs”) from our hotel to the Duomo, passing a couple of palaces, the Scala Theater or Teatre de Scala or something like that, a number of impressive statues, a big public parc, and some very cool buildings. Every once in a while, we’d pass a side street that, rather than being straight, was curved around – it’s hard to describe, but it was very cool, because the buildings curved around with the street, making for an interesting optical experience when you tried to peer down them. We arrived at the Duomo, which is a very large (read: gigantic) cathedral in the middle of a large, open plaza surrounded by a mélange of high-end shops and overpriced tourist kiosks. Against my expectations, we were only approached by a gypsy peddler once while at the Duomo, which we handled (as we would for our other experiences) by straightening up, glaring intimidatingly, and giving a short, forceful Non, grazie, before completely ignoring whomever it was that came up to us.
The Duomo was simply amazing. I have to stop for a moment here and apologize: there’s no way that I’m going to describe it in any way that gives the cathedral any justice. It was practically half-art museum half-place of worship, a mix of dark and light, exquisitely and delicately beautiful and formidably stern. In the brief reading I did, I believe that the Duomo was constructed in the gothic style, with multiple spires and flying buttresses (I think that’s the term, it’s been a long while since my last art class), layered with statues, scenes in stone, marble, and gold. The outside itself was white marble (or maybe it was simply stone. Possibly covered in lime?), which in the Milan morning sun was both brilliant and hard on the eyes (it helped that I was already squinting from the reflection of the sun in the plaza when gypsies came up to us, as I was already halfway to a glare). Certainly intentional, the way the structure was built moved your eyes from the base of the cathedral all the way up – it was a natural progression of the eyes from the earth to the heavens. Even given the sun and the glare, you just couldn’t help but look up. In contrast to the bright, busy plaza outside, the inside of the cathedral (free admission, amazing) was dark and quiet, heavy shadows broken by pops of color from stained glass stories and the lights and candles placed at altars to saints, cardinals, and benefactors. The central line of the cathedral, from the pews to the apse, was lined with large, ancient paintings depicting different scenes from both the bible and the church’s own religious canon, which hung above like square and looming dreams. The outer walls were equally lined, though with altars to different saints and patrons (that’s the word I had been looking for) and stained glass panels. Some of the monuments were larger than others, some more ornate, others solemn with heavy-looking statues and carvings. It made me wish that I knew anything about religious iconography; I feel as though I would have retained more of the story they told, or would have at least been better able to describe them. You’ll have to look at Alex’s pictures. It’s really the only way.
Most striking to me: at the very heart of the church, far above and behind the main altar, was a single red light bulb, small and seemingly inconsequential compared to the other masterpieces of art and light throughout the rest of the church. However, from the little bit of reading I’d done, I knew what it was; the red light bulb marks the place where a single nail taken from the crucifixion of the Christ now resides. Whether you believe or not, it’s both powerful and eerie to be in the presence of an object so closely tied to the heart of a major faith, to be so close to something that knew a man called Savior so intimately.
After exploring the inside of the church, we decided to scale the roof. We bought tickets for the roof access and, being bona fide (or at least honorary) Lyonnais, we decided to take the stairs up. You can walk around the whole perimeter of the roof, which not only gives you an unbeatable view of the surrounding city, but allows you a close-up look at the towering structures and statues that top the church. It was very, very cool, and sections of the roof shaded by the still towering walls of the cathedral provided a nice resting spot for us already-weary travellers.
Upon coming down from the Duomo, we had a nice lunch (I had the most delicious gnocchi of my life, to date) and then walked about 15 minutes (again, not including turn-around time) to our next touristy destination, the Castello Sforzesco. It was a really, really big castle, and quite Italian looking (I’m not exactly sure how to describe that, but it definitely didn’t look like the heavy stone castles I’d seen in England). The castle was in the middle of a restoration project, so some parts of it were difficult or impossible to access, but we still saw quite a bit before our feet gave out. The castle holds something like 8-12 museums within its walls (we went through three or four), access to which was free for us under 25s. We encountered some gypsies in the palace (that’s for you, mom and dad), which I believe Alex is describing with more vigor than I am (this is already pretty long), but again managed to dissuade them. We went through what I believe was either the museum dedicated to the castle’s art and history, or the ancient art museum – it could have been either, really – and saw a number of impressive statues, frescos, and suits of armor, some of which went back to the time of the ancient Romans. Somehow they managed to fit two towering and intricately carved arches within the castle’s space. We saw some beautiful tapestries, a lot of busts of dead people and old guys, a number of statues that ranged from depicting a scene with Bacchus and centaurs to showing the Virgin Mary with child, and an exquisite painting that may-or-may-not have been a da Vinci (really, we couldn’t figure out from the description if it was or wasn’t). After wandering around the first floor of that museum, we trekked about to find the museums of Prehistory and Protohistory and the Ancient Egyptian Museum. We saw bronze-age tools and stone-age jewelry, sarcophagi and an actual scroll from the book of the dead. We also saw a real mummy (all wrapped up) as well as an x-ray of the mummy’s insides, which was pretty cool, even though we’d actually seen two other mummies while at the Duomo (I forgot to mention that, but there were two altars to two different cardinals or bishops, which featured a glass casket through which you could see their well-preserved remains – face, teeth, hands, and all – dressed up in Catholic finery). Satisfied with the day’s body count and feeling like our feet were about to fall off, we called it a day around 3 pm and took the metro back to our hotel. We took a nap, had dinner, and finished off the night with a Mad Men marathon. Oh, and we had some really yummy gelato!
The next day, we slept in late, had lunch, and then boarded our train back to Geneva, completely unsuspecting of the terrible, awful, and purely miserable day of travel we had ahead of us.
-Teal
