On our first morning morning in Milano we woke up to very unusual quiet noise outside.
No footprints of people trotting to work, no noisy traffic queueing, even though we were not on a main street.
Then we looked out of the window.
A winter scene awaited us. Huge soft billowy snow flakes! Falling swirling, softly down. It had obviously been snowing for a while, as everything had about 6 inches, or a palm span, of snow - trees, parked cars fences, footpaths, motor cycles - wait til you see the pics when I work out how to load them! What was most amusing that nobody pushed the snow off their vehicles before driving off! So all moving traffic had a thick layer of snow of top - like a layer of icing.
After breakfast Chris and I set off walking in the snow to our arranged time to view the famous Last Supper fresco which we anticipated was about half an hours walk away.
What fun it was, walking in the crunchy snow! I have not done so for years!! We soon found out that it is best to walk where someone else has been so that we do not walk into pot holes, and that the salt which is liberally scattered everwhere quickly turns the snow to much wet slush in the gutters and to ice on the roads where no ice has been scattered.
To our surprise, we were a day early for our booking!! So back to trudging along the Milano city pavements in the snow - fun..... Then we discovered a very interesting art exhibition by a renowned Italian Artist Sifano (pardon spelling - will change it in due course) of his work from the 1960´s to 1990s. Some of it was nostalgic because during this time the role and acceptance of modern art, along with protests etc in the sixties and seventies was rather contraversal. I am sure that there is a website somewhere.
For much of the day we wandered around the city square, visited the Duomo, which looks very clean having had the outsides restored to their marble coloured glory, but the inside was still dark, and visited Chris´favourite department store Rinascente (pardon spelling). We found out that many of these particular stores have, when they can, roof top cafes often out in the open. This one looked straight out to the Duomo at roof height - an excellent way to view the beautifully carved roof top. I went up to the roof on an earlier visit to Milan about 8 years ago a stunning and peaceful place to rest and reflect, especailly, as at that time, there were thousands of visitors down below! There was a much smaller crowd there today - another reason for travelling to Europe in winter!! Oh and did I mention the Milano sales? And the people travel to Milano to go shopping at the winter sales?? Wait for my next blog......
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