My most social day yet in Italy! I caught up with my breakfast room friends and compared body aches after our hiking efforts yesterday. I also had a chance to talk for a while with my hosts who are a lovely young Italian couple, the father in law has been bragging every morning that the expresso he makes is the best in Italy.
My train to Milan did actually depart (there was some doubt due to the regional strike), and I travelled in a compartment with a Victorian couple who were seeing all the sacred sights in Italy. A couple of American boys got on half way through, one was a winemaker currently based in Italy and the other was a filmmaker who had worked in new Zealand and could hold his own in a political discussion. Before I knew it I had arrived in Milan.
Milan is not exactly pretty, it's a big industrial city with cars and urban sprawl. What it does have is mindblowing clothes shops, but then it is the centre of the fashion universe. I went from feeling a bit overdressed in the morning in a black dress to dowdiness by the afternoon. Of couse the young look hip and slick, but the older Italians (who actually can afford their prada gucci etc) are a little mutton dressed as lamb... Could be all the gold and makeup.
My hotel is an ibis, not normally my style but the staff rate was so good €48 a night, and it is actually in a great neighbourhood and has a double bed! What I don't like about them is there is no sense of the country, you could be anywhere in the world.
I filled my afternoon by visiting the duomo (a beautiful marble gothic cathedral with an atmospheric interior, very dark to highlight the incredible stained glass windows, and there is a resident saint in a glass coffin on display, thankfully wearing a gold mask. Still his body was doing ok for 500 years). The streets surrounding the duomo and piazza are all filled with high end fashion labels, then "see and be seen" bars with the tables facing the street (I stopped for a cocktail and nibbles to watch the locals strut their stuff and show off all those labels). I decided to call it a night when a thunderstorm came out of nowhere and soaked me through.