Milan

Wednesday
Today we started off early from Montecatini to drive to Milan where we will be spending the next 2 nights at the Milan Ibis near the airport.  It is about a 4 hour uneventful drive, again expensive tolls about 40.00 Euro

Restaurant over the highway

From the hotel we took the airport shuttle to the airport to catch a train to the city which is about 40KM away.

Jumped right on the train after buying our ticket from a machine, read the ticket and saw that we were supposed to get it validated.  We knew this from previous train trips in Italy, but totally forgot.  Confirmed with the lady sitting across from us that we were supposed to validate, she suggested we just write the date and time on the back and hope that would work.  Lucky for us no one came around to check our tickets.

The train exit is basically right in the touristy part of Milan, which is not actually all that big.  We hoped to just spend today in Milan and then visit outside the city by car tomorrow.

We started off with a visit to the Castle which is next to the train station.  We did not spend much time as we wanted to go see the Cathedral and the center of town which is only about 15 minutes walk.

Love seeing old street cars here

The Duomo is in the very center of town like most other cities.

Taking my piano to work

Next to the Cathedral is where the very expensive shopping is.

I was lucky and got tickets to see The Last Supper, there were only 2 days left with tickets in November and very lucky for us one of the days was today.  This normally books up months in advance, and I was very slow at looking for tickets.

They let about 30 people in at a time to view and with tours also booking tickets not too many tickets left for individuals to spread around. This mural by Leonardo da Vinci painted between 1494 and 1498 is the most reproduced painting in the world.  I was surprised how big it was, probably because we were surprised how small Mona Lisa was. The size is roughly 15 by 30 feet.

It is in the refectory of the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie.  On the opposite wall of the Last Supper is The Crucifixion from 1495 by painter Giovanni Donato Montorfano, also very impressive.

No pictures allowed at all in here, some tried, but we respected the rules here. 

We were there a few minutes early, so we did a walk around 1 block, beautiful architecture.

After viewing the Last Supper we visited the church and we went back to wander the castle grounds again, then back to the square again where the Last Supper was to connect with Massino, a client of mine that lives in Milan.  We had a great visit at a nice little bar right off the square.  We visited for about an hour, got some great suggestions for how to spend the day tomorrow.

We then walked back down to the Duomo again for some more night time photos.

We picked up some dumplings for supper at a little place outside the train station to eat on the train.  Since our tickets weren’t stamped on the way to the city we were able to use the same tickets to get back to the airport.  So ½ price trip into Milan for the day, always nice.

Back at the airport we waited for the shuttle to pick us up to go back to the hotel.  What chaos here.  So many Uber drivers waiting, shuttles trying to pick up people, people and cars everywhere.  We were very happy to have no luggage and just hop on the shuttle when they arrived.