TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 20
At 7:30AM, the drilling was so loud outside our door it sounded like a dentist drilling in our mouths. And with the sound came a fine dust drifting across the floor into our dank, cave-like studio apartment, slightly below street level and with only one tiny, shuttered window. But after a shower, an odd breakfast of food carried from France and opening the heavy wooden shutters, things looked brighter, at least for a while…
WALKABOUT TOUR THAT STARTS WITH HISTORY AT THE DUOMO
We signed up for a walking tour with Walkabout Tours that started at the Piazza de la Duomo at 10 and had to hurry. Then the key stuck in the door and the doorknob fell off. Luckily Alberto, the Airbnb owner, came over immediately. We ran to the subway, exited at the Piazza de la Duomo into the cold air and drizzle. We were five minutes late. No guide with yellow umbrella in sight. We sidled up to random groups of people, hoping to find our group, until Chloe spotted a man holding a closed, yellow umbrella with a yellow backpack, Maurizio, our guide.
He started the tour over for us, and so began our best tour experience to date, rich in descriptions of history, architecture and art. The tour lasted four hours, even with Maurizio’s quick walking pace. He carried plastic-covered photos in his backpack that he pulled out to explain details. By the end of the tour, we had a deep appreciation for, and fairly decent historical understanding of, Milan. We visited many sites, some as old as Milan, over 2,000 years old, and saw remnants of its 200 years as the capital of Italy (beginning in the 3rd century), as well as years of occupation by the Spanish, French and Austro-Hungarians. The earliest people known to live in Milan were the Celts in 400 AD. Milan’s independence arrived in 1860.
We learned about some of Napoleon’s vanities, the Visconti family’s wealth and power, the rebuilding of la Scala, how Mussolini changed some architecture and why there is a Maurizio Cattelan statute with a middle finger in front of the stock exchange building. It was placed there after the financial crash of 2011 and is meant as a comment on fascism and capitalism.
Starting at the Duomo, Maurizio asked us to remember the year 1386. That is when construction began on the Duomo, the third largest cathedral in Italy. The Duomo took over 500 years to complete and has over 3,000 statues attached to it.
PIAZZA SAN SEPOLCRO, A PIAZZA THROUGH THE AGES
Near the Duomo is the Piazza San Sepolcro. Surrounding the Piazza are the Church of San Sepolcro, which was built in 1030, and for which the piazza is named, and a town hall. Within this tiny piazza are examples of architecture from the 11th, 14th, 18th and 20th centuries. Also, the symbol of Milan, a dragon eating a child, is chiselled in a stone emblem on the town hall.
On the other side of the piazza, on a road leading to the Duomo, is the Hall of Justice, and a statue of “Lady Justice” who has had a lot of body work over the centuries. Her head and hands were cut off with some frequency in order to be replaced by the head and hands of whomever was ruling Milan at the time – Spain, France or Austro-Hungary. And each time, needless to say, the hands and head belonged to men.
JEWEL IN THE CROWN OF MILAN – CHIESA DE SAN MAURIZIO
The finest jewel in the tour was the Chiesa de San Maurizio, which was a monastery for nuns during the Renaissance. Though plain in appearance on the outside, on the inside the church is covered with the most delicate and luminous frescoes, and the ceiling is a tapestry of design and symmetric perfection. Ordinarily Maurizio’s tours are too large to be allowed entrance to the church, but on such a cold, blustery day only a few other stragglers joined his tour, and so we were allowed in.
The frescoes were painted by the most revered painter of the time Bernadino Luini. He isn’t often remembered today because he fell out of favor with the powerful people of Milan in the late 16th C, but when he first painted the church he was considered equal to Rafael and Bernini.
At the back of the church is Maurizio’s favorite painting, a depiction of Noah’s Ark where one pair of animals climbing the ramp are horses with a single horn. Unicorns! Maurizio conjectured that maybe they are meant to be rhinoceroses, which had never seen Milan, but only heard of, or maybe unicorns died in the flood. That was his joke of the day.
ROMAN RUINS
Tucked off a main road on the way to the Castello Sforzesco, where we would end the tour, are Roman ruins of the Imperial Palace of Maximian. The base of the excavated red brick structures can be viewed from above. A small billboard shows how far the Roman walled city spread across what is now Milan and the many canals running through it. These canals were covered over by Mussolini to build roads, but the people of Milan are now uncovering them.
Mussolini influence on the city is apparent in the fascist architecture, which is simple, unadorned, with large bricks and proportions.
HOUSE OF SFORZA AND THEIR CASTLE
The Sforza family came to power in Milan in the 1450s, following on the Visconti family. For the next 100 years, they ruled Renaissance Italy from their base in Milan. The Sforza Castle was the center of the walled city. Built in the 15th century on the remnants of a 14th century fortification, it was enlarged in the 16th and 17th centuries, becoming one of the largest citadels in Europe. The original castle is long gone. The one that now stands is a museum rebuilt in the 1900s. Many Milanese people wanted the castle destroyed because it symbolizes suppression. People were murdered, tortured and imprisoned within the castle walls.
RETURNING TO THE SFORZA CASTLE
After the tour, and frozen to the bone from standing in the damp cold for hours, we had a quick meal in a not-so-warm restaurant, of not-so-warm pasta. Outside again, we headed back to the castle , which not surprisingly, had no heat.
Maurizio told us a story of ghosts who haunt the park behind the castle. But it wasn’t until we visited part of the museum that we felt the ghosts. There is a stone statue of a girl, long hair falling down her back, dressed in a simple gown, her hands touching in prayer missing part of one arm missing, who stares vapidly but lifelike into the dark, stone room where she is alone. Her gaze follows the viewer much like that of the Mona Lisa, but her smirk is not playful. Her face is solemn as the light from a high, small window moves over her during the day.
MICHELANGELO’S PIETA RONDONINI
The Castle is home to Michelangelo’s Pieta Rondonini, his last, and unfinished, white marble sculpture. Guarded and in its own room, I thought its unfinished quality made it less important than other of Michelangelo’s sculptures and focused only on the finished parts, the perfectly rendered, sinewy lines in the marble legs, back and clothing.
Chloe said “I like Jesus’s face.” I looked closer. We circled. The faces of both Mary and Jesus, their pain, their postures, the points that were chiselled and were not, created a quality that brought their sorrow to life. Then I wondered if the sculpture had, in fact, been finished.
We shopped for groceries on the way back to the apartment. The floor was a dust carpet. We watched a horrible movie on Netflix, and waited for the heat to come on. Then Chloe climbed up to the top bunk and I slid into the squeaky bottom one and we went to bed happy.
