Our Recent Experience in this Capital of Fashion.
by Jeff Corbett
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Pickpockets, beautiful architecture, crowed streets and expensive restaurants – welcome to Milan, Italy.
Milan, a metropolis in Italy’s northern Lombardy region, is a global capital of fashion and design. Since the early 1980s, Milan’s fashion industry has achieved great commercial prominence. It is also considered a financial hub and one of Italy’s wealthiest cities known for high-end restaurants and shops.
Our brief stay there in September was at the end of fashion week, which is held twice a year in Milan (actually named Milano). If you come into this city, be sure to get an English-speaking tour guide to help get your bearings because the metropolis can be a little overwhelming even for the most sophisticated of traveler. Also, expect high-price tags on everything. This might be the most expensive location in Italy.
The Gothic Duomo di Milano Cathedral and the Santa Maria delle Grazie Convent, housing Leonardo da Vinci’s mural “The Last Supper,” testify to centuries of art and culture are two of the top attractions. Our guided tour of “The Duomo” as it is referred to by the Milanese was breathtaking and amazing – it is hard for Americans to wrap their imagination around a cathedral which took six centuries to build. Our experience with Leonardo’s painting of “The Last Supper” was disorganized but nonetheless, worth the effort. Tickets are near impossible to obtain, but we were lucky enough that our travel agent could get us set up. The lines moved well and while it was great to see a Da Vinci, it wasn’t nearly as big a deal as it was made out to be.
The city is also known for high end bistros, which will provide you with numerous choices, including many Michelin Star restaurants. The Italians are not shy about prices. On our first full evening there, we had an 8:00 PM reservation at a restaurant named Cracco located in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Italy’s oldest active shopping gallery and a major landmark of Milan. The Milanese are notorious for being late evening diners, and most restaurants don’t even open until 7:30 PM. The biggest surprise of the evening was when they offered a water menu which offered a common Pellegrino for a huge amount of Euros up to a glacier water option which had a shocking price point. In any case, it was a lovely evening.
I am not sure we will pass this way again but very glad for the experience.
Street Performer Outside The Duomo.
