Italy Vacation, June 2007 Milan

 We decided on the spur of the moment, to take off for an Italian vacation. We scrambled to get tickets and reservations and wanted to go to Umbria and the Marches. We left my Mom and sister in charge of the chickens and landed in Milan to get over jet lag. The most amazing thing in Milan is a gigantic pink Gothic church, called the Duomo . This cathedral, started in the late 14th century is a confection in curlicues, statues, pious and less than pious rainspouts, towers, flying buttresses, cutouts, arches and generally everything done to exuberant glorious excess - all in pink marble. The inside has impressive stained glass - but they don't photo well. This didn't matter because the overwhelming part of this building is its roof .

 And they let you go up an explore the roof - which isn't flat so walking on the slopes is interesting. You can tell where people have found the marble steps particularly steep or the marble roof slippery because in that spot only, the marble handrails will be polished to a silken smoothness by innumerable hands over the centuries. (Below is a photo from up on the roof, notice the duck-angel rain spout who is holding his mouth wide open. Looney Tunes!

 And just for scale, here is me with about 1/4 the roof stretching behind me. I came home vowing to polish up the marble block I got back in my rock carving days and that the bay plant in the sunroom sits on. I intend to use a Makita grinder rather than my hand, though, to get it polished.

 Milan means high fashion to many, not us though. (Tom named the current fashion Peek-a-Boob.) One of the things we will remember is the most fantastic fish market. We were almost in tears not to have a kitchen to cook in!

We stayed in Hotel London in Milan - a grand find!  It is centrally located, the staff is superb and the rooms small but lovely and by big city standards, very reasonable. We ate at the Ristorante Solferino  on both the start and end of the vacation and had simply superb food. Their osso bucco is better than ours - which is saying something, the steak tartare is grand, and the raw anchovies are marvelous and more like a Japanese semi-pickled fish or a marinated fish than totally raw.

One of the nice things about staying in a place a couple of days is that you have time to find the perfect bar or the great breakfast place. We never found an excellent place for breakfast in Milan, but "our" bar is the Victoria Caffe .  This is where I had to go native and find an apertif that was suited to Italy (my usual bourbon and soda is hard to find). And so I joined the ranks of Campari and soda drinkers - Tom went with Cynar and soda (I can't find a great Cynar link but this one will do). The cafe was great fun and during happy hour had nice nibbles. There was a very fancy promotion of a champagne being staged at the cafe one afternoon and we had a grand time meeting the two spokespersons for the label. Our friend is German, so Tom got to practice his German a little.

 After getting over some jet lag and some of the stress that has built up over the last few months, we were off to Perugia by train.