Hot in the City: Milan

Milan was hot. Not sure that I have much else to say. Really hot. Exhaustingly, drainingly, stickily, why am I bothering to lift my lukewarm water bottle to my lips, it’s just a waste of valuable energy as I’m going to die of heatstroke anyway, and I might as well use my last vestiges of strength to drag myself to that gelateria in the distance so I can die happy, although it’s probably a mirage come to think of it hot.

OK, so there were one or two interesting sights. Apparently I’m still having issues with believing guidebooks, or at least internalising what I read in them, because the guidebook told me that Milan’s duomo was the fourth largest cathedral in the world, and my reaction when I saw it was still “wow, that’s absolutely enormous!!!” And beautiful, and quite different from all the Tuscan ones I’ve got used to lately.








There was a rather creepy crypt downstairs, where I couldn’t help imagining nasty Inquisitional-type things happening (not based on historical fact), and an installation that consisted of a big black square overlaying most of the screen of a segment of Zeffirelli’s film about the Passion.

And then I went to the Brera Pinoteca, where they had everything from 4000 year-old figures to Braque. Standouts were Piero della Francesca’s Pala Montefeltro, Raphael’s Spozalizio della vergine, and Hayez’s Kiss. There are some paintings that seem to light up the room when you enter, and those were the ones for me today. The fact that I could still care about paintings when I was on the brink of death from dehydration says a lot about Piero and his colleagues.

Here’s the park. Doesn’t it look nice and green and cool? It’s not.










Here’s me ready to go home now. Utah’s probably lovely and cool right now, isn’t it?







I might manage one or two more posts before I wrap this up, but if not, thanks for reading - I can't tell you how nice it's been to get your blog comments and emails!