Category: Italy_2012

Having just returned from a two-week stint in Italy, lots of folks have been asking, “How was your vacation?” People seem surprised by my simple “good” response.

Just good?

Under normal circumstances, I would say fabulous. We did some very cool stuff, saw lots of amazing sights, ate a whole lot of good food, drank quite a bit of good beer and wine, spent quality time with friends, etc. But vacationing two weeks after Mom’s unexpected passing wasn’t “normal.”

I’ve never had to work so hard, mentally, to enjoy a vacation. Nothing against the people I was with, it just took quite a bit of effort to block all the negative stuff from my head and try to enjoy Italy.

Yes, it was good to get away. But the guilt of leaving was awful. There’s so much yet to be done. Plus there are a gazillion other things one thinks about when a loved one dies.

It’s sort of like having a cold. Mornings and evenings are usually the hardest. You tend to feel worst when you are at your weakest. Once you wake up, it all gets a bit easier to bear. Then every now and then things sneak up on you and, wham, you feel crappy again.

I’m slow on the trip reporting for similar reasons. My most-faithful reader is gone. She didn’t comment much — I always gave her a hard time for that — but she enjoyed reading the blog. Her form of commenting was chatting with me about my posts. She was always telling her friends to have a look, too. Knowing that just makes sitting down to do a post doubly hard.

I’ll get the trip reports done eventually.

I’m not apologizing for being slow, I’m just trying to explain why blogging just doesn’t have the same appeal for me right now.

Anyway… back to Italy.

I’m still on day one. That’s the day we arrived. Since we had some spare time on Sunday afternoon, we visited the Duomo (Milan’s cathedral).

Or at least we tried to.

Unfortunately, thousands of other people had the same idea. The Duomo is old (construction began in 1386). It’s very big (supposedly can hold 40,000 people). It’s adorned with thousands of statues, stained glass, paintings, etc.

We were disappointed not to go inside, but neither of us could fathom standing in that line. We’ll have to go back off-season like my buddy Fuzzy who had the place almost to herself when she visited.

Seeing the outside was impressive enough.

It’s hard to explain just how big and majestic the place is. Pictures don’t do it justice. It’s hard to convey the sheer size of the place.

Click on any of the images on this page for a better view.

Because I had my zoom lens with me, I was able to capture some pretty cool images of a few statues and some other sculptures on the building’s facade.

The last image, shown below, is my favorite.

And that’s just a few of the statues. There are thousands.

Even if Milan wasn’t my favorite city, I’d still like to go back someday to see more of the Duomo.

We are finally home. We arrived Sunday after a very long travel day (about 18 hours from our hotel in Italy to home). It’s good to be back. It will take quite a while to go through all of the pictures, but I’ll try to tell y’all about the trip in bits and spurts.

We left home on September 1, flying direct from Dulles International Airport, just outside of Washington, DC, to Heathrow in London and then on to Milan’s Malpensa Airport. The initial flight was a red-eye that left Dulles at about 6:30 PM ET on Saturday and arrived in Milan at about 10:30 AM local time. There’s a six-hour time difference, so it felt like 4:30 AM ET when we arrived.

Rather than stay in an airport hotel, we opted for one closer to the motorcycle rental facility on the outskirts of the city. After all, that’s the whole reason we flew into Milan.

The cab ride cost about 80 Euros, which is just over $100.

Ouch, right?

We tried to stay awake, which is usually recommended to get over the time zone change, but ended up taking a three-hour nap. I was already exhausted before we left and hadn’t slept a wink on the plane. By the time we arrived at the hotel, I was so tired, I felt physically ill.

The nap helped. Our motorcycle rental didn’t start until Monday morning. Since we had some spare time on Sunday, we headed into the city to see Milan’s Duomo (cathedral church), the second-largest church in Europe that can supposedly hold 40,000 people.

No, that’s not a typo. I did say forty thousand.

We walked to a nearby train station and headed into the city. Sounds easy, right? First, it took us a while to find the train station. It was only about a quarter mile from the hotel, but you couldn’t see it from the hotel. The hotel reception clerk told us to turn right from the entrance of the hotel, walk to the street, turn left, walk straight and we’d see the station.

Keep in mind, we were in a town outside of Milan, not in the city itself. The train station was tiny (unlike Milan’s central station, which is HUGE).

Once we eventually found the station, the trick became figuring out the timetables, buying a ticket, finding the right platform, etc. After a just a little bit of back and forth, we did manage to find the train. And we even boarded the one going in the right direction.

Typically, for trips like this, I spend the week or two before the trip getting ready. Lining up all of the details. Like how to get from our hotel to the train station (I’d normally print a map in advance). Researching restaurants in the vicinity of our hotels. Writing down sights to visit and noting their locations on a map.

With Mom’s passing and everything I was doing related to that in the weeks preceding the trip, I didn’t get any of that normal advance trip planning accomplished. Heck, I didn’t even go back to my house until Thursday night. I worked on Friday, packed my bags Friday night, then we left Saturday morning to take our dogs to the dog sitter’s house (my mother in law), then headed for the airport.

As a result, we floundered a bit more than usual. It was all part of the adventure.

There were all kinds of sights to absorb on our walk from the railway station in the city to our destination.

HINT… click on each image to get a larger view.

We were not hugely impressed by Milan. Granted, our visit was brief. We had no idea what we were looking at. We didn’t know where anything was. Also, we’d only been in Italy for a few hours and just weren’t comfortable yet. It takes a little time to get used to floundering one’s way through a world presented in an unfamiliar language.

For me, one of the coolest aspects of visiting Italian cities and towns was never knowing what you would find around a corner. We were walking down an otherwise blah street when I happened to look down a cross street and spotted the scene captured in the image above.

Very cool, eh?

I never did get used to see women in skirts and dresses riding bicycles and scooters. Quite amusing, but also quite normal.

People-watching was fun. Really. During our time in Italy, we experienced the full gamut of best- and worst-dressed people ever.

Hubby was tickled to spot this Mini Cooper SUV (the black one) conveniently parked in front of a standard Mini.

Who knew there were Mini SUVs? Now there’s an oxymoron for you!

This statue of Leonardo da Vinci was quite popular. In upcoming posts, you may notice that I have a thing for statues.

When we finally reached the square housing the Duomo, Hubby and I were appalled to see thousands of people waiting to get into the Duomo. Since we’d been walking past a mysterious line of people for blocks and blocks, we weren’t completely surprised. But still. That was a LOT of people. As much as we would have liked to have seen the inside, we decided just to look at the outside instead. That was impressive enough.

Now, had I done my research, I would have known that Milan’s central plaza (piazza, pronounced pee-ott-za) is one of Italy’s most-visited destinations. Not only is it the home of the Duomo, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II is also on the piazza.

This is apparently the city’s premier shopping destination. It was full of people, too. But the architecture was rather impressive.

Here are some snapshots showing the storefronts in the Galleria of two of Italy’s most-famous merchants…

We walked right past those. Honestly, we didn’t go into any of the stores. It was getting late by that point and all we both wanted to do was find a place to eat dinner and then go to sleep. Since the city was so crowded, we agreed to just head back to the hotel and eat dinner there.

Unfortunately, the hotel’s restaurant was closed.

Lucky for us, there was a supermarket nearby where we bought some bread, deli meats, cheese, dessert, and water. Then we headed for our room to enjoy a picnic/dinner in bed.

After that, we crashed. That’s how Day 1 in Italy ended.

I’ll share some of the images I captured of the statues outside Milan’s Duomo in another post.