If you listed the great cities of Europe, you’d probably have to look pretty far down the list to find Milan. Unless you are a top model or footballer, there isn’t much to make you stay in Milan. Milan was not originally on the agenda for this trip but sometimes things don’t work out exactly how you plan. However, it gave us a great opportunity to spend a night in the city of finance and fashion and Italy’s second largest city to see the few sights the city does have to offer.

We arrived at about 11:15pm from Geneva and were starving and were lucky to be staying at some dumpy one star hotel right next to the only open pizza place in town that was phenomenal and a great re-introduction to Italian food. After gorging ourselves with pizza we tried to sleep in the scorching hot room on the lumpy beds with no window shades and were rudely greeted by the sun at like 6am so we figured we would just throw in the towel and go see the sights.

This was my second time in Milan and I always said the only time I would come back would be to see an AC Milan or Internazionale game but they weren’t playing last night so we went and saw the Duomo instead. I forgot how gorgeous it is. With a capacity of 40,000 people, it is the worlds largest gothic cathedral and a treat for the eyes from the outside. The inside is very dank and dark and looks like the gothic church that it is. The Duomo contains some 3400 statues, 135 spires and an awesome 155 gargoyles. Let’s face facts: no gothic church can be complete without a ton of gargoyles.

After the Duomo we hopped on the Metro and headed to see Da Vinci’s The Last Supper at the Cenacolo Vinciano next to the Santa Maria della Grazie. Unfortunately, we didn’t book a tour ahead of time and the tickets were sold out much to our displeasure although there was nobody inside…hmmmm? They had clearly been bought out by the 10 million Asian tourists and tour groups that seem to haunt Italy like the Bubonic plague.

Certain Asian tourists find it necessary to take pictures of absolutely everything in sight with always at least one of them in the picture but then they take turns. The pictures can include but are not limited to; street signs, trash cans, solitary benches, rocks, telephone poles and other completely inconsequential and useless pieces of matter. This has boggled my mind for years but especially today when we were denied entry and they were all just priming their $10,000 cameras for the perfect shot with one of them in it making a peace sign with their fingers.

Anyway, Milan served its purpose (along with fantastic sandwiches and gelati) and we are currently on the train to Venice which I am psyched for. This will be my second visit to Venice but first since 1998 so I have a lot of refreshing to do and I cannot wait to eat my way around the city on water!

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