Tuesday in Milan, Wednesday in Como

We've had a busy two days, so I'm going to take Kathy's advice and keep it moving. Tuesday morning we had reservations to visit Da Vinci's Last Supper at 9:30 am. That meant that we had to be out of the hotel by 8:30 to get to the metro, find the church, (the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie), and check in a half-hour early. That turned out to be pretty easy.

Tickets are by appointment only, and go on sale (online) every three months. I tracked the website almost every day and as soon as the next block opened, I purchased and printed vouchers for the date we would be in Milan. When we arrived at the church, we traded them in for tickets. Kathy left her passport as surety for a pair of headsets for the tour.

To get into the refectory (communal dining room) where the Last Supper is painted on one wall, you have to pass through several de-humidifying rooms, which are designed to protect it from the elements, like the locks on a space station or a decontamination level.

The opposite wall from the Last Supper is covered by the Crucifixion fresco by Giovanni Donato da Montorfano, who completed it in a year, using the traditional fresco technique of painting on wet plaster. 

The Last Supper, however, though painted on a wall, is not a fresco. Leonardo spent three years working on it. According to our guide, after three years, the Bishop asked him why he wasn't finished yet. Leonardo got upset and used the Bishop's face for the face of Judas. (I'm not sure if that's true, actually.)

Leonardo painted the Last Supper using an experimental technique with tempera or oil paint on two layers of dry preparatory ground. His compromised process meant that the pigments were not permanently attached to the wall, however, and the painting began to flake within a few years.

Our guide was great; very vivacious and animated. She told us who each person was in the painting, and about the history behind the painting, including its modern (scientific) restoration. Later in the day, we saw her in the Duomo, leading a tour there.

We were finished with our tour about 10:00 am and our next ticket (for the Duomo rooftops) wasn't until 2:30 pm. So, we decided to catch a tram at random and just ride it to the end of the line. (Anything where we don't have to walk.) The #16 tram took us out to an industrial area, and dropped us off. We had hoped we'd be able to stay on the tram and just turn around. We had to walk back a few blocks until we found the tram stop going in the opposite direction.

Before our trip, I created a Google Doc with restaurants I wanted to visit for each day of the trip. In addition to recommendations from guidebooks and friends, I typed "cheap eats" into Google Maps and looked at the reviews for each of the spots that showed up. One such surprise was Pasto - Laboratorio di pasta con cucina, which we loved. They have a short menu (four pastas) on a chalkboard. It was delicious.

After lunch we walked back to the Duomo (Cathedral) in the center of town, and took the lift to the roof-top. Actually, the lift only went half-way to the rooftop, to what are called the terraces. To our chagrin, we found that we needed to climb the rest of the way on a steep marble staircase, with no opportunity to just turn around and skip it.

The Duomo is done in a mixture of different Gothic styles, which is unusual for Italy.

 From the terraces and rooftop, you can see that the stone work is varied and extremely detailed, considering that no-one but the artisans themselves could see it close up for over a thousand years. Kathy was especially taken by the fact that all of their work was done for God, not to be seen by man.

Here's a picture of Kathy on one of the lower terraces looking out over the shopping gallery below.

Work didn't actually stop on the Duomo until the 1960s. In the corner of the roof, on the reverse side of the facade, you can find some modern boxing scenes from the 1950s, as well as a portrait of Benito Mussolini holding a hand grenade. Why? I'm not sure, and Google didn't answer my question.

The other thing they don't tell you about the lifts is that they only go up (if only half way). You have to climb all the way down the steep medieval stairs entirely on your own power. Once downstairs we visited the church. This is the third largest church in the world, after St. Peter's in Rome and the Cathedral in Seville. The scale is simply astonishing and the fifty-two pillars are massive. 

We hadn't booked a tour of the church, however, and so we just  wandered around and took it in. I had a guidebook, and we sat in a pew and read through that. I was more impressed with the rooftop, though.

Under the church is an archeological section which contains the original baptistery where Ambrose was baptized and where, thirty years later, he baptized Augustine. I was interested in this because before we left I attended the first meeting of a church history class at Calvary Chapel, where Brian Brodersen talked about both of them.

After leaving the Duomo we walked back to our hotel through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Italy's oldest active shopping gallery, opened in 1887. 

Wednesday at Lake Como

We left our hotel before 9:00 am, caught the Metro to the train station, and purchased some tickets for Varenna-Esino on Lake Como. We had a little problem finding the track, and, when we did, the train was just pulling out at 9:20 am. Fortunately, because this was a regional train, we could use the ticket on the next departure at 10:20 am. When we arrived at Varenna, it was sunny, although a little hazy.

We purchased a mid-lakes ferry ticket, so we could hop-on and hop-off, and set off across the lake for the original Bellagio. It was a quaint, but crowded town.

We walked to the northern end of town, to Punta Spartivento (the point that splits the wind), where the two "legs" of Lake Como diverge.

Then we walked back into town and had some Italian sandwiches at a bar in town. I hate to say it, but I think that Jimmy Johns makes better Italian sandwiches.

North of town, we found this immense fixer-upper, going along the promenade for about a block. I couldn't believe that such a prime piece of real estate was sitting here abandoned. Our guidebook said nothing about it. Finally, I zoomed in on Google Maps and saw that this is the future Ritz Carlton, slated to open in 2026.

For the rest of the afternoon, we got on the ferry and took the big loop from Bellagio to Tremezzo with its faux-castle on the hill ...

... to the lovely church at Lenno ...

... to Villa Carlotta, where you can tour the house and gardens. We, however, were content to sit in our comfortable seats and enjoy them from afar.

We landed back in Varrena about 4:00 pm and walked up to the train station, just to continue our streak of arriving on the platform just as the train was pulling out. No worries; the next one will be along in an hour! We sat in the little café, ate a cream-puff, got on the 5:30 pm train and were back in Milan at 6:30 pm.

We picked up some Falafel and Donner Kebap for dinner in our room. Tomorrow we're catching an early train to Rome.