Milan was, as Hannah says, mediocre Milan. I think it could have been really cool, it’s a pretty well-known place for a reason. We went because we wanted to see the Last Supper, but when we tried to book our tickets almost 6 weeks in advance, it was already sold out. We went to Milan anyway, hoping to get tickets on a last minute tickets website we found, and if worse came to worse we’d just go to the cenacola to see if we could get in. Well none of those worked and at the end of the day we didn’t get to see the Last Supper. Our hostel in Milan was the jankiest hostel ever, the elevator was straight out of a horror movie, and there were really creepy guys in the room next to us. At night, they were smoking on the stairs, and when I went to call the elevator, all I saw was the figure of a man outlined in the stairwell window with a red glow from his cigarette. I didn’t realize what was there and it scared the crap out of me. I also didn’t even get to shower because there were some very questionable hairs on the floor of the single shower, so to admit it, I had taken one shower since leaving for Paris. Teehehe. We did get to see the Duomo in Milan though and that was really cool when we walked in and there was a Sunday service going on, especially because it was All-Saint’s weekend (Ognissanti). There were so many people though so we decided to come back after we went to walk through the area with all the high fashion. I didn’t love going into Prada… I hate shopping even when I can afford it. But I did enjoy seeing the fancy McDonald’s camped out right next to the Louis Vuitton in the center of the entire place. Oh McDoog’s. When we went back to see the Duomo a second time, we had no idea what else to do afterwards so we just ended up sitting on the pews inside the church for about an hour. When that got boring, Hannah and I walked across the Duomo Piazza to a café and had some coffee with Bailey’s, our new favorite drink since Ireland. We ended up sitting at that table outside with heaters above us but still freezing, trying to fawn off the hundreds of umbrella sellers that approached us. We were honestly just waiting for the time we needed to go to the train station. At that point we just regretted paying the extra money for the later train. Oh well.
Our train departed Milan at 7:30 and I was the only one slightly disappointed to be going back home. I was the only one that had not been away from Florence for 10 days since I stayed there with my parents, but everyone else was ready to be home. First thing we did when we got there? Went to Gusta Pizza. Of course we did. We looove Gusta Pizza. And we spent the next day, our Monday off, doing absolutely positively not a single thing. It was awesome.
Jumping back into the school mode was fairly difficult after 10 days of frolicking around Europe. Most of me wanted to still be in Dublin but instead I was sitting in Italian on Tuesday morning learning how to say words in the past tense. Awesome. Wednesday wasn’t so bad when my Great Masters class visited the Restoration Lab in Florence. Amazing! The people that work in there are expert restorers working on restoring huge masterpieces like Titian’s “La Bella” which we saw being restored right then and there, and also Raphael’s “Madonna with the Goldfinch” which had been restored earlier. I thought it was an amazing opportunity to not just learn how art is restored but to actually see a masterpiece that close up in its most vulnerable state and being restored in the city of Florence! Holy crap I’m lucky.
My iconography class visited Santa Maria Novella again that week to see the beautiful depiction of the life of John the Baptist, painted by Buonarroti, Michelangelo’s teacher. I had previously studied the lift of Mary, which is on the wall opposite at the front of the church, but we turned around this time and learned about John. I love this stuff. Also got to see Masaccio’s Trinity and Brunelleschi’s Crucifix again. Masaccio’s piece is one of my favorites visually because of the bones beneath the crucifix and historically because of how much history is behind that piece.
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