The train pulled into the Milan Grand Terminal at about 1:30 PM. Make that 1330. You get used to thinking in 24 hour time here if you spend any time at all on the trains. ALL the schedules are in 24 hour time, and it makes sense. You no longer have to worry about day and night, just the date. But I am sure that we will get that wrong one of these times, as well.

The route from Venice to Milan is not spectacular in any sense of the word. Mostly flat, mostly agricultural. We did not have a window (again!) but we did sit by an older Italian couple. They talked and fussed with each other most of the trip. The husband read a prayer to St Christopher as we started off, and I thought that they were sort of fussy with each other. As the trip continued, we started "speaking" a little, pointing and grinning, that sort of thing. Then the wife asked if we spoke French, or German. Doreen speaks both, so that was good, but Doreen then said that I speak Spanish. Happiness all around! They had lived in Argentina for 20 years! He was the manager on one of the big Estancias (The boss, they made pains to tell me) and they both spoke perfect Spanish. So we had fun the rest of the trip talking about Italy (They live now in Trieste), Argentina, and the rest of the world. They told us that we should REALLY take a trip to Sicily, so we are considering that.

Now, the train station in Milan is REALLY something. I think that I mentioned it before, but it was built by Mussolini, and for some reason unknown to me, was not destroyed in W.W.II. It is HUGE and as Doreen said, is PoMo before PoMo was cool. (For those of you outside the architectural world, that means Post Modern. In Houston, you can think about anything that has all sort of geegawas and huge heroic figures. For the rest of you, look at the photos and think about what new buildings you have seen built in the past 15 years, and you will get the idea)

We have been here before, though, so we did not have too many worried about the ever present gypsy pickpockets, the crowds, or the carts. We got two carts to help us move our stuff, and took a cab to the hotel. It was only a $6 cab ride (!) and we were installed in the Hotel Cavour quickly.

The Hotel Cavour is really close to everything, and consequently seems to be a very popular business hotel. The service we got was, well, French. No one asked if they could help with the bags, and there was very little interaction with the front desk that made me smile. On the first day, we asked if they could help us with tickets to Leonardo’s Last Supper, or to La Scala. They said no, it was too much work. You had to call, or stand in line, and it was just too much trouble for them to help.

I HAD investigated what was appearing at La Scala before we left for Europe, however, and how you get tickets. The opera being performed is Dialogues des Carmelites by Francis Poulenc, and it seemed that you could not get tickets until six weeks before the performance. So I bided my time, and as we traveled, we investigated various means (scalpers) to get tickets.

In Paris, American Express wanted to charge up $300 for the good (Orchestra) seats, a little less for other seats. The person who was to make our hotel reservations in Milan said that they could get tickets at about $270 each. All those prices included a hefty "service" fee. Yipes! We finally decided to use one guy, but HE ended up doubling his price on both the room and the tickets, so we asked a good friend in Houston (thanks again, Karen) to help with hotel reservations, and we would work on the tickets ourselves.

Because the hotel had no interest in helping, we figured we may walk to La Scala ourselves, maybe go into their bookstore, go to their museum, and just check the place our. Doreen suggested that we just go to the box office to see what we could do about tickets. I had little hope that they would even be open, but, because I am ALWAYS willing and eager to do what Doreen says, we asked about the performances while we are here (three nights) The guy said something that I didn't understand about the current day's performance, that the next day was NOT a La Scala production, so he could not help, and that Friday was sold out. So we asked again about that day, and TICKETS WERE AVAILABLE! FOR OPENING NIGHT! So we bought two of the best seats left, and paid (while not cheap, this is face value) about $120 each. Orchestra Seats!

The opera is a very austere production of an opera written in 1952 and the subject is a Carmelite convent in revolutionary France. The basic story is about faith, fear, courage, and cowardice. It was not a long opera, (about 2.5 hours) and was very moving in parts, and just a bit tedious in others. It is unusual that most all of the parts are for women (surprised? I think not) The climax is extremely moving, making chills run down your spine and tears come to your eyes. (The Revolutionary tribunal has sentenced all the nuns to the guillotine. There are about 12 of them They are all singing Salve Regina. The guillotine drops one by one, and the chorus is reduced in volume by one voice each time. You don’t see the guillotine – just hear a drum rift and a nun falls to the ground.)

We had been to see the ballet Cinderella at the Opera Garnier in Paris. Both productions were unconventional, but completely opposite in scope. This version of Cinderella was choreographed by Rudolph Nureyev in 1986, and he set it in 1930’s Hollywood. The sets were inspired by the movie Metropolis, and everything was big, big, BIG! The sets for the Carmelites were almost non-existent – just bright lights, dark shadows and all the people. Instead of the usual large scale pageantry (French Revolutionaries in uniform, lots of flags) the nuns were surrounded by literally 100 people dressed in poor clothing. We had spent a lot of time in Paris thinking through the horrors of the Revolution, and this opera was a moving portrait that it was ordinary people behind the most abhorrent acts.

The orchestra was fantastic, and La Scala, well, what a place to see an opera! It has a lot fewer geegaws and filigrees than that Opera Garnier in Paris, but the sound was like none I had heard before. Wonderful place.

Another interesting place we visited was the Science and Technology museum. It is a HUGH museums, four stories, with everything from a whole wing dedicated to radio transmissions (Marconi, the guy who invented the radio, was Italian) Someone had also taken the time to create a bunch of Leonardo’s machines. There were all look – don’t touch, which was a disappointment to me, but interesting none the less. They also had a large exhibit dedicated to the mining, winning, and smelting of various metals. I felt right at home!

But the oddest thing at this museum was the military wing. It was a large building, and inside it was A TALL SAILING SHIP!!! Again, you could not go ONTO the boat, but it was all there! They had blue gauze to simulate the water, and you could walk upstairs and look down onto the deck (It gave me the willies. I am really afraid of heights.)

The also had an amazing collection of guns. They were all just sort of sitting there on the floor of the building, but these at least you could touch. Well, you could touch them until someone saw you, anyway. There were a bunch of kids (probably 10 years old) in there, and they thought it was quite amusing to have the guns pointed at them while making the ack-ack-ack machine gun noise with one’s mouth. Doreen was not quite as amused. (ed. note: the children were NOT playing with the guns. Dan was aiming at them. And it was the museum guard who fussed at him who was definitely not amused. dns)

We were only in Milan for three days. I won’t go into any more great detail about the shopping, La Moda, the Duomo, or how we found our way around. Two things though, sort of stood out in my mind.

I think that most of y’all know that Milan is really the center of the fashion industry (No matter WHAT those people in Paris say) and there is one street, a pedestrian street at that, where all the boutiques are situated. We walked down there, and you could NOT believe the "look" that people had. Now, I am not usually much of a fashion plate, but neither do I wear Def Leppard t-shirts, cut-off shorts, and black socks with my sandals. And I think that you all know that Doreen dresses well most all of the time. But on this street, I felt as if I was going to get a "fashion ticket" for being so under dressed. Even Doreen said that even she felt like a "schlub" (Though I think that was mostly psychological) because of the "look" everyone had going. There was an elementary school on the street, and the mothers picking up their kids were better dressed than most women I have seen going out to the opera in Houston. (Interestingly enough, there were a lot of English nannies picking up children as well. They were generally overweight, underdressed, and very, very pink.)

The other thing that was so very noticeable was the window design in all of the shops. It was simply perfect. You just cannot fault the design sense of these Italians.

We had dinner our last night in Milan at a place called pubblicita, which means "publicity" or "advertising". We had seen it as we walked around our neighborhood, and it was mentioned in one of Doreen’s magazines. People eat very late in Italy, and we felt that if we showed up around 8:00, we would be able to get a table without a problem, and there would be at least a couple of people there already.

We were wrong. We walked in, and there was not a soul eating in the place. When asked what time they open, a very tall, very chipper girl said 8:30. We asked if we could get reservations for that time, and she just took us and sat us at the table! We were not sure if we were to sit for a half an hour, or someone would come by and take at least a drink order.

Finally someone came by DID take our drink order. (Ordering "cocktails" in Europe is always a problem. If you ask for a Martini, you get sweet or dry vermouth. If you ask for anything else, who KNOWS what you will get. So we had some champagne.) They also brought the "cover" or a basket of bread to snack on while you wait.

Our meal was quite good, which included a focaccia for an appetizer, and various raw and barely cooked meats.

People did start getting to the place shortly after we did. A young American couple got there, ate and left quickly. We stretched the meal out all the way to grappa and desert, and it took about two and a half hours to get through the meal.

The next day we were off to Florence, on a fast Italian train.

RETURN TO GRAND TOUR HOMEPAGE!