(Note: we have a few more pictures that will be added to this page later.)
The last leg of our journey to Milan was a half-hour shuttle flight on SwissAir from Zurich. After seventeen hours in the air from Bali through Singapore and then the long flight to Europe, seated next to a German businessman who had a cold, we were dazed and tired. An hour's layover in Zurich, where we sat in the chilly airport, watching airplanes taking off into the dawn sky, had refreshed us only a little. When the SwissAir stewardess learned of our day's flying she clucked sympathetically and gave us several chocolate bars. We appreciated her kindness later that morning, when Kathryn became fussy. Small pieces of chocolate were always a sure way to quiet her for a little while, and although we felt guilty doing it there were times when we would have sedated her if we could have.
After wandering around Linate airport for quite a while, we finally found the Peugeot agent, bought a phone card and a city map, stuffed our bags in our leased car, and drove off toward Milan. Following the signs to the "centro" brought us to downtown Milan where we became immediately lost. The plan of the central city looked like cracks in a shattered pane of glass. Streets changed names at every intersection, converged in irregular little piazzas crammed with double-parked cars and richocheted from each other at crazy angles. Most of the streets shown on our map proved to be one-way, placarded with signs that we could not understand, restricted for taxis and streetcars, or filled with pedestrians. We drove through the same places over and over as we tried unsuccessfully to find a way from one point to another, sometimes covering two kilometers just to get around the block. However, traffic moved slowly and the other drivers were tolerant as we stopped, started, reversed, and drove in circles, and we were eventually able to inspect a few hotels and check into a modest pension on a tiny alley near Milan Cathedral. There was no hotel parking lot, of course. All the curbs in the area, although lined with parked cars, were posted with signs showing tow trucks. More cars were parked in a nearby piazza where a short uniformed man was selling parking cards in various denominations. The regulations for using these cards were posted in English and Italian and sounded like rules for some arcane board game. I bought a fistful of cards, dumped them on my dashboard, and walked back to the hotel and fell sound asleep until the next morning.
(The posted parking rules read: From Mon to Sat in the "blue areas": from 8.00am to 8.00pm for a maximum period of two hours at a charge of L2,500 per hour on the SOSTAMILANO card. From 7.00 pm to midnight there is a onetime SOSTAMILANO charge of L5000. In areas where the one-time rate of L5000 is in effect from 7.00pm to midnight if the car is parked before 7.00pm and departs after 7.00pm the SOSTAMILANO cards will be worth one or two hours until expiration. After this expiration you must have a L5000 SOSTAMILANO card valid until midnight. Before 9.30a, from 1.00 to 3.00pm, and after 7.00pm commercial vehicles while loading or unloading goods are exempt from payment. On Sundays and in the holidays from 8.00am to 7.00pm you can park longer than two hours at a fare of L2500 per hour or L5000 per 4 hours.)
We liked our hotel very much, after we woke up a little. Our room was small and clean, with a sink, lots of dim lights, and the convenient bidet which I used as a computer desk. We had a good view of the laundry room. Only a few people worked in the hotel. The desk was manned by a tall dark-haired woman with a brisk manner and florid gestures, or sometimes by an gracious older man. He served cappucinos and lattes from the counter and accepted our payments as though they were gifts. I took them to a sitting room up the hall where I worked diligently on our backlog of postcards. We were still writing on postcards from Melbourne and New Zealand. In the mornings we would meet the Chinese cleaning lady who spoke excellent English, and a handsome young man whose job seemed to be hauling huge bags of laundry up and down the narrow stairs. There was also a short man with a mustache who woke me up at six one morning to ask if I had taken a shower, or perhaps if I was planning to take a shower. I said no, and, uncertain of which question I had answered, did not try to shower that day.
The shower down the hall was a chilly room with a compact rectangular tub ringed with a plastic curtain, equipped with a hand shower hanging on a hook at ankle level. If we sat down in the tub the cold curtain clung unpleasantly to our backs. If we hung the shower head on its hook our feet stayed warm but the rest of us became chilled. I ended up standing like a statue, one hand permanently above my head, fumbling with the shampoo bottle and dropping the soap with the other. I began to feel that daily showers were more trouble than they were worth.
Anything that got us chilly was to be avoided since, coming from Bali with our tropical clothes, we found Milan very cold at first. Our bodies also took a long time to adjust from Indonesian time, and we were asleep by seven and awake at three. By seven or eight a.m. I was usually out walking around our hotel, bundled up in several thin layers, watching shops open and the streets fill up with people heading for work. They took scooters and trams or walked briskly. They were well-dressed in long overcoats and crisp leather jackets. We felt conspicuous in our rumpled clothes. The first morning, while I was sitting in a small arcade by our hotel, with Kathryn playing on the sidewalk at my feet, a man walked over and gave me a thousand lire note. A few days later someone else gave Mary money as she stood on the street holding Kathryn. After that we tried to smooth out our shirts and look a little less like vagrants.
By ten in the morning we were usually in the Piazza Duomo, eating breakfast and watching the crowds milling around the cathedral entrance, sitting on the stairs and feeding pigeons, the flower stalls, the vendors with bunches of garish helium-filled toys tied to bricks. Spiderman, Simba, and the Little Mermaid floated above us as we drank tart red orange juice and munched on crispy toasted panini filled with mozarella and tomato, prosciutto, or insalata tonna -- dolphin-safe, we hoped. Then Kathryn would take a nap back at the hotel while Mary read a travel book and I wrote some postcards. In the afternoon we would go out again, exploring the museum in the castle, searching for English bookstores, or window-shopping.
Sometimes we simply walked. There was always something to see in Milan. One day I went out for a walk and found my usual route clogged with shoppers and tables covered with coins, stamps, phonecards, and old magazines. A sign explained this was the regular weekly market for the Associazone Filatelico-Numismatica di Via Armorari. I looked at the American coins for sale. Lincoln pennies were L5,000, bicentennial Kennedy dollars for L6,000, and quarters which looked unexceptional, except for being in perfect brand-new condition, were selling for L5,000. Further on down the street my way was blocked by a colorful political rally, complete with podium, music, and banners. There were a lot of green scarves, shirts, and flags, most bearing a symbol of a flower in a circle. The speeches were beyond me but from the posters and stickers I gathered that the object was an independent country of Northern Italy, which would be called Padani. "Padania Liberi!" The crowd cheered and blew air horns. The point of secessione was to end the flow of golden eggs from the chickens in Padania to the farmer in Southern Italy, according to one of the posters. Booths sold Padania identity cards, green soap, green nail polish, and more green scarves. It felt like a martial St. Patrick's Day party. Later, driving through Italy, we would see "Lega Nord" and "Padani Libre" graffitti, and were pleased that we knew what it meant.
We enjoyed the stylish point and counterpoint of the Milan streets, with their sleek modernity on a backdrop of weathered classicism. A young woman in black tights and a lime green jacket, leaning on a weathered, shadowed twelfth-century church. Ultra-modern lamps and fixtures, halogen and chrome and anodized aluminium, framed in gray marble arches that were standing when the Turks sacked Constantinople. This contrast of old and new, rare at home, was effortless here. I began to understand why some Italian design could look as it did; why the latest Alfa Romeo Spyder, ridiculous and shellfish-like in an empty showroom, looked so right amid the stone pilasters and columns of old Milan.
Just as it took a while for us to overcome our jet lag, we also had to adjust to Italian time. Opening and closing times, that is. The shops closed at one in the afternoon and opened again at three for a few hours; almost nothing was open on Sunday and not much more on Monday. Accustomed to business hours in the United States, we frequently found ourselves standing at a locked shop door, mentally figuring if we had enough diapers or food to last until the next opening hour. When the shops were open, we had to anxiously count our shrinking supply of lire before buying anything. None of the ATM machines in Milan accepted my autoteller card and we were unwilling to dip into our small stash of traveler's checks. I finally found the local American Express office, cashed a check, and walked back to our hotel beaming. It is thrilling to have a million and a half of anything, even if they are only lire.
Our fruitless trips to the store were no inconvenience, as our hotel could not have been more conveniently located. Via Speronari was a small cobblestone alley fifty meters long and a self-sufficient little world of its own. It had a bakery, a shop that sold sweets, the grandiosely named Supermercato, some clothes stores, a sort of deli which sold sauces and stuffed pasta hot and ready to eat, a tiny door leading to the local coin and stamp dealer, and two jewelery stores. The jewelers were on the ends of the street and closer to the boutiques on Via Torino than the modest shops in the alley. The other end opened to an oddly shaped five-sided intersection of Via Falcone, Via Giuseppe Mazzini, Via Giarditto and Via Cappellari, with a small pizzeria, a pharmacy, the arcade where people gave us money, and posters advertising movies like Guerre Stellari and Il Paziente Inglese. In the morning I walked down the narrow stairs from the hotel into our hallway of a street, through the piazza, over the tram tracks and left and down a block past the Ciao! restaurant and by the stands of tulips, potted plants, and bonsai trees into the Piazza Duomo where I would always stop and look up at the crennelated spires and carved towers of the Duomo.
The Duomo (Cathedral) and the Castello Sforzeco (now a large art museum), at opposing ends of the broad Via Dante, dominate central Milan. We spent many hours exploring the Duomo and walking around the towers and pathways of the complex, pinnacled roof. I was moved by the carved figures held high above the roof on tall pinnacles, which have looked over the city for nearly five hundred years. The Duomo is a massive building, one of the last great Gothic cathedrals, looking more French than Italian with its flying buttresses, tall spires, abundant carving and sculpture in white marble, and great height. Some reading revealed that the Duomo has much of France in its history. The overall design was partly by a French architect and much of the construction was directed by French and German masons during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The building was finally completed in the early nineteeth century at the direction of Napoleon.
When we toured the castle, the feeling was completely different. Where the cathedral was a place of exultation, every spire and column and tall stained-glass window soaring high to God, the castle was a harsh, heavy structure, all dark and functional. It had the aesthetics of a main battle tank. The walls were built high for purposes of war, not worship. We walked through chambers lined with inward-facing firing ports and by towers and balconies angled for interlocking fields of fire. I imagined the designers planning how attackers would be funneled by wall and moat to narrow killing zones where they could be decimated by archers and the survivors trapped and slaughtered by the castle infantry, or flayed screaming in the dungeons below. We did not actually see any dungeons, but they can be assumed to exist. Every self-respecting castle has some.
After a week without email in Bali, we spent several hours on Compuserve reading our backlog of messages and catching up on our friends and family. The email brought sad news. A close friend had suffered a miscarriage. Another was separated from her husband and soon to be divorced. We were depressed. We were traveling and exploring, with little care or worry, but also without the company of our friends. When people we loved back home went through bad times, we felt frustrated and guilty that we could not help or even visit and listen quietly. Sometimes we worried whether everyone we loved would still be there when we returned. Lying in our hotel at night, both of us had vivid dreams in which our friends disappeared or died. One night I dreamed of my dear dog, who had been dead over a year.
After four days in Milan, we were adjusted to the European climate and time zone. We had money belts full of lire, mapbooks, and an embryonic knowledge of tourist's Italian, Berlitz style. "How much is this?" "When do you close?" "I want to pay the bill." That was enough, we decided, and we retrieved our car and left.
Traveling On a Budget
Milanese hotels are said to be expensive, but we found two clean, convenient one-star hotels right in the center of town, each less than five minutes' walk to the Duomo, for L90,000 ($US 54) at night or less. We picked the more expensive one, the Hotel Speronari on Via Speronari, because the people behind the desk were nicer.
Parking is a expensive hassle in downtown Milan. L2,500 buys a one hour parking card good in the small piazzas-cum-carparks, if you can find a space. The hotels will probably refer you to the parking garage at the Piazza Diaz (L40,000 for 24 hours.) We stumbled on a small parking garage in Via Nerino that charged L28,000 for a day. For a few days' stay in Milan, parking a car can cost the equivalent of an extra night's budget hotel room.
Breakfasts of toasted sandwiches and espresso in one of the stand-up bars around the Duomo runs about L6,500 a person, and for lunch or dinner L10,000-15,000 buys a pizza or pasta in the pizzerias. Prices in the supermercatos -- hardly supermarkets, more like minimarkets with a deli in the corner -- seemed pretty unexceptional except for jars of baby food, which ranged from reasonable for fruit to steep for meat.
All the ATM machines we found in Milan were all on the Cirrus System. Cards from the Plus System, like our Bank of America cards, will not work. (We later learned that at least one Italian bank, the Banque Nazionale di Lavoro, does take Plus System cards.) We depended on the local American Express office for cash, and were very happy that we were cardholders.
Rather than renting a car, we had arranged a purchase-sellback with Peugeot through Auto France. We picked up a brand new Peugeot 406 with just 41 kilometers on the clock, complete with full insurance cover, new car warranty, and roadside assistance contract, and promised to return it five months later. Leasing in this manner is fairly economical (about $US 22 a day for the period) but you do have to keep the car clean and new just as if it were yours for good.
Staying Connected
Our hotel room had a telephone with a standard RJ-11 modular jack, and Compuserve had a local node in Milan. It took only ten minutes and two trips to the hotel desk to figure out what a dial tone was supposed to sound like, and we were online. Note though that the Compuserve nodes in Italy are almost all on SEVA or some other network, not direct CIS nodes, and access software will have to have the appropriate network log-in scripts. Our laptop, running WinCIM, did. Our palmtop, running acCIS 3.1, didn't.
In Bali we had bought an electrical plug multi-adapter for the double round prongs used there. This proved to work in some of our hotel room receptacles, but the prongs were too big in diameter for other receptacles. The hardware stores (negocio fermanenta) sell an adapter to convert the big prongs to little ones.
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© John Liu/Mary Sauve 1997. You may link to this page but you may not otherwise use, take, or republish this material.