Project Runaway

Part of the plan, the very loose plan, was to base in Lucca and then explore from here. ‘Mishing it’ as Luc would say.
It was decided we would check out Milano and do a day trip up to Lake Como.

So Monday we headed out by train to the great industrial north as it is always referred to. Now, I didn’t really know what to expect
from Milano. Most of the locals we asked did not seem to like Milano. ‘It could be any European city’, I was told. ‘They are always in a hurry and it is all about business’ was another comment. Hmmm. But we decided to check it out for ourselves anyways.

After a 4 hr train ride we arrived and checked into our teeny tiny room. Then off we trekked to find the Duomo and the shopping district.
This allowed us to get a feel for Milano and to do a lot of window shopping at the same time.

Now, I had an image in my head that this city would be all skyscrapers and hordes of suits, ties, and cellphones. It is nothing like that. The buildings are a mix of old and new. The old being of various centuries and the new, in some instances, meaning around early 1900s.

We saw traffic flowing in a steady and organized fashion. Everyone stayed in a lane. You rarely, if at all, heard any honking. The streets were not packed with hordes of suits. There were business people, but there were plenty of average ‘joes’ also. I also found that there was a greater ethnic population. Our hotel was in an area where I saw many Africans, Koreans, Chinese, and Turkish people.

Then we reached the Duomo di Milano, and to say that we were impressed is an understatement.

“What a wonder it is! So grand, so solemn, so vast! And yet so delicate, so airy, so graceful!” –Mark Twain

The Duomo is the largest Gothic cathedral in the world and the 4th largest church in the world after Rome, London, and Seville.
You can climb to the roof and stroll around which is, in my opinion, an absolute must do. Even if you are afraid of heights, this would be a great time to get over it. You can see all of Milano and of the mountains just off in the distance.

Just next to the Duomo is the neoclassical shopping mall called the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. Inside this beautiful building you can blow your budget on Prada or Louis Vuitton. Or you can sit at the McDonalds in between them and have a cappuccino. Because the McD’s does serve them. This is where the boys cracked and each had a hamburger. I sat next to them holding firm to the ‘no hamburger’ pact I had made with myself.

After more touring around and doing some shopping in stores that actually were a bargain, we headed back to our teeny hotel room again to try and get some sleep. Try being the operative word as sometime in the middle of the night, dozens of men shouting and sqawking at each other in many languages started to set up an open air market in the parking lot in front of the hotel. Sleep is overrated anyways.

We next dragged ourselves, literally, to the train to head to Lake Como for the day. There are two ways to do this. You can take the train to Como and then a long boatride up the lake to Varenna, Bellagio, and Mellagio or you can take the train to Varenna and then ferry over to the other two towns. We opted to head straight to Varenna.
This tiny town was very beautiful and pretty much untouched by touristy shops etc. The whole area between the 3 towns is probably one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.
Here we had some of the best pizza yet at the Ristorante Sole. Luc has had a couple of pizzas now where they put gorgonzola cheese on it. Delicious!
Bellagio was the most touristy and had lots of shops etc. Again a very pretty town, but definitely different from Varenna. A lot of the shops had these tacky tchatchkes in them that looked German or Swiss in nature. Mostly children in their lederhosen and dirndl about to come on down the mountain with Heidi. Since Bellagio seemed like a place for the very rich I wonder who bought these types of tchatchkes? I am thinking George Clooney has not decorated his villa with these.

After a bit more shopping back in Milano the next morning, hey it is Milano, we had lunch on the terrace of the Rinascente store beside the Duomo. The restaurant was called Obika‚Äô. It is this fabulous mozzarella bar restaurant. You order the kind of handmade buffalo mozzarella you want, then you pair it with types of fresh salads and fine Italian meats like salame or Prosciutto from Tuscany. It was a great lunch and being on the roof next to the Duomo was amazing, sitting there with the stylish Milanese. There was even a Dominican monk who looked a lot like Burl Ives, sitting in his long brown robes and ‘mandals’, as Luc calls them, enjoying his mozzarella and salad.
When I got the the ‘conto’ I could not help but think that monks must make more money than I thought.

Allora…tired, but happy that we did it, we then headed ‘home’, glad that we got to decide for ourselves that we do in fact like Milano, even if it is just another European city.