Visiting Hours are Now Open

Three weeks ago, my parents and sister came to Milan for a week to visit during my sister’s spring break. They got here on a cloudy, rainy, normal spring day in Milan; the weather the Friday before they got here, we had the nicest weather we had had all year. The rain was prophetic, however, and everywhere we went it rained (except Florence, but I wasn’t there so it doesn’t count).

They arrived in Milan on a rainy Sunday morning, and I left my apartment around 8 to meet them at Cadorna Station (where they would be arriving at 9ish). I walked up to the bus stop and was waiting to take it to Cadorna when, sitting there, I watched it drive right on by. Good start. So I had to walk up to Cadorna (the next bus was estimated to take 30 minutes to get to where I had just been left in the other bus’s dust). So I walked and walked and finally got to the station around 9:30 and got to see my family after a month and a half!! Joyous reunion. Then I walked them over to their hotel, about 5 minutes from Cadorna, and gave them a brief overview of where they were staying (just off of Via Dante, the main pedestrian street in Milan which goes directly from Castello Sforzesco (the big fortress/castle which was the town center back in the day) to the Duomo (essentially all the sightseeing you need to do in Milan on one street).

So they got settled in to their hotel and then we headed out to get some much needed breakfast. I took them to my favorite bakery near the Duomo, an place called Princi. They didn’t have the opportunity to see Princi in its usual state of controlled chaos, with Italians yelling orders across the counter to the incredibly efficient people serving them from behind the counter, but they still got to enjoy a few authentic Italian pastries and cappuccini.

Fragolata

Brioche e Cappuccino

Mom Me and Dad

Right after, we headed to the Piazza del Duomo, to see the Duomo (obviously), the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele II and il Teatro Alla Scala (Milan’s famous/historic Opera House). We didn’t take the time to go in the Duomo, seeing as Sunday services were going on and I feel rude/uncomfortable being touristy in the middle of a sermon, but marveled at how enormous it is and how empty Piazza del Duomo was (very rare). Then wandered over to the Galleria to see the ridiculously ritzy stores/restaurants housed there (along with McDonalds) and then over to La Scala, to see the museum and hopefully get a look in the theater itself. The museum was pretty interesting, with a collection of clavicembali (the predecessor to the Piano), portraiture of former Scala stars and outfits worn in the last few plays produced by the Scala Company. We also got to see in the Theater itself, but it was pitch black because they were setting up for a piano concert to be held that night, and so we didn’t get to see the enormous chandelier that hangs in the hall in all its decadent glory.

Our next stop was Castello Sforzesco, to see the Michelangelo as Architect exhibit (how he designed the Duomo in Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore, and some other buildings I can’t remember the names of). It was pretty cool too, but really just a collection of a bunch of sketches Michelangelo made, nothing world-changing. We also stopped in the Egyptian Museum housed at Sforzesco, and learned that Cats and Ibises were the two animals most often mummified by the Egyptians, so obviously I took a picture of a mummified Ibis:

Creepy? Yes. Awesome? Not really. Random reference to Miami’s mascot? Absolutely.

I also wanted to show them around Parco Sempione (the park right behind il Castello) but the gross weather and the jet lag dampened interest. It would have been a little miserable to walk around on the sure to be muddy paths. Just not worth the hassle. We headed back to the hotel to rest up and figure out what exactly the plan was for the rest of the week, and I got my new computer finally! (that actually happened when we went to the hotel the first time, but I just remember that I got it when my parents came so, here you go. Stream-of-consciousness blogging strikes again). So I played with my computer and got it all set up, and we figured out the plan for the rest of the week:

Monday: Padova and Venezia

Tuesday: Florence

Wednesday: Como

Thursday-Saturday: Cinque Terre

Saturday  noonish: Return to Milan, get a bit more sightseeing in, head to the Airport (parents + sister, not me).

As for the rest of Sunday, we left the hotel and headed over to my school so I could show the beautiful Chiostri off, but it was closed. Instead we visited Chiesa Sant Ambrogio, the church right next door to my school, and then headed to my apartment so I could drop off my new computer!! and so they could see my fortunately recently-cleaned apartment. After all that we headed back to the hotel once more to figure out where to get dinner. The concierge suggested a place right across the street, and it turned out pretty well! For some reason I ordered three courses, while everyone else got one, so I was eating for an hour more than them. And was full about halfway through my second course. I hate leaving food behind though, so I kept going and going until I legitimately could eat no more, and then waited a few minutes and ate a bit more than that.

After dinner we went our separate ways, ready to get up early tomorrow to go to Padova and Venice!

Somehow, I managed to wake up too late to make the first train we wanted Monday morning and yet the people who had traveled 12 hours the day before and were 6 hours jet-lagged managed to be up on time. Whoops. We ended up taking the 9:05 train to Padova, and got there around 10:30 (maybe? Remembering exact times from 3 weeks ago is pretty tough). The big attraction in Padova for us was the Orto Botanico, the oldest botanical garden in the world. We headed straight there (in a cab, which to my public-transportation obsessed self seemed like sacrilege) and went in to explore the awesomely old garden. There’s not much to say about the garden, so I’ll just post pictures I took:

Ants!

Berries!

Flowering Pitcher Plants!

Pretty!

Orchids!

Goethe’s Palm: Oldest plant in the Orto, from 1585. So old

Kammeron really wanted to visit this garden because she is going to grad school for Landscape Architecture, so we went in to the library of the garden to see what we could find. There were drawers and drawers of seeds going back to the first years of the garden and pressings of some of the first plants grown there. It was amazing how much they had kept from almost 500 years ago. (these three pics are all from Kammeron's camera)

Pressings

Carvings of Mushrooms

Drawers of Seeds (from 400 years ago)

We headed out after that and walked around Padova a bit (mostly looking for a way back to the train station to get to Venice) and saw la Basilica di Sant Antonio (I think? It was the patron saint of oppressed peoples or something along those lines) and then decided to forgo the taxi route and got bus passes back to the station. We got on the bus at the stop down the street from the Tabacchiero where we bought the tickets and since I was leading got on the bus going the wrong direction. Figure it out pretty quickly, luckily, and got on the bus going the right direction at the next stop, but of course I do public transportation wrong in some way. We made it to the station eventually and hopped on the next train to Venezia, to take a canal tour and wander around a little. When we got there the weather was gross (of course) so it wasn’t as awesome as when I went a few weeks before, but the canal tour gave us awesome views of the city and the family got some good shopping in while we were there. 

Gondolas

Piazza San Marco, not nearly as packed as Carnevale

View to San Giorgio

We headed back to Milan around 7 and got a quick/cheap dinner from a café on Piazza del Duomo. I had class the next morning so I went home and got some sleep, while Mom, Dad and Kammeron planned for the trip to Florence the next day.

They went to Florence and spent lots of money then came home and we went to aperitivo at Bar Brera, one of the most famous aperitivi in Milan. There they finally got to meet one of my roommates (Jorge) and we all had a good dinner while watching an Inter Milan game with a bunch of rowdy Italians who were also at the bar. It had a certain kind of serendipity that they got to see real Italians really getting crazy watching a soccer game, and to hear all manner of Italian swear words being yelled, while doing one of the quintessentially Milanese things: getting aperitivo in the Brera district. After we finished dinner, my parents went back to their hotel while Jorge, Kammeron and I headed back to the apartment to go out to Hollywood, one of the trashy clubs we love to go to. And that’s pretty much Tuesday (at least from my perspective)!

On Wednesday Mom, Dad and Kammeron went to Vernazza, a town on Lago Como, while I went to class. And I’m honestly having trouble remembering what we did Wednesday evening. Whoops?? Thanks to my mom's help though, I just remembered that we went out to dinner at a pizzeria called Fresco, right off of the Piazza del Duomo. We got three different pizzas and shared all of them, and they were delicious of course. After dinner, we headed home to get rested up for our 8 am train ride to the Cinque Terre the next morning! That's coming in the next blog however, which will be up in a few days. Talk to you then!