Milano – Thursday, May 12, 2022- We arrived to Milan yesterday after a miraculous day of travel with no delays, hassles or mishaps. Not only was it a miracle to have no flight issues these days, but it seemed like a miracle that we are actually on a trip. For the past two years, we had gotten so good at making, and then cancelling, plans – Japan, Sweden, South Korea – that it seemed unreal until the last minute that we would even go this time. But here we are, thousands of miles from home, in a world that looks unchanged in many ways- crowds of tourists, no Covid restrictions except required masking at a few places. It’s surreal that northern Italy was one of the first places hit worst by the pandemic, and here is the busy city of Milan, its streets crowded, the trams and buses clanging along, sharply dressed business people grabbing lunch at the outside trattorias.

We checked into our apartment near the Duomo – it’s a sort of AirBnB – a few converted rooms carved out of the top floor of an office building – and headed to the over-the-top Gothic fantasy that is the Milan cathedral. The fourth-largest cathedral in the world, we rode to the rooftop on the elevator (thank God and the Madonnina statue at the tip-top of the cathedral that we didn’t have to take the stairs) and marveled at the more than 1,200 statues that festoon the pink-white confection of a structure – everywhere you look, there is sculptural decoration, from statues standing atop spires to a lowly pigeon carved into the steps on the rooftop. The Visconti family that started building this cathedral in the 14th century to glorify their despotic reign were late to the game – Gothic was going out of style by the time they got started, and it took more than 600 years to complete. We were surprised by how hot it is here in Milan right now, and it was very hot up on the roof, so we headed down for a pretty mediocre, expensive meal on a terrace with a fabulous view of the facade of the cathedral. The view made up for the food.

Today, we started with a walk through the fashion district of Milan, where armed guards stand outside shops with names like Prada, Gucci, Missoni, Chanel – while inside, stern masked employees glowered through the windows lest we should decide to come in and dare to look at the merchandise we clearly couldn’t afford. The streets were lovely and old, though, and it was fun to see the high fashion in the windows. We then walked to the Castello Sforzesca, the medieval castle tricked out by the ruling Sforza family in the early Renaissance. Ludovico Sforza was a Renaissance prince, not unlike Lorenzo the Magnificent de’ Medici in Florence. Sforza hired none other than Leonardo da Vinci to be his court artist for 18 years. It was for Ludovico that Leonardo painted his Last Supper, which we saw later in the afternoon. But first, we wound our way through a museum that Rick feared would never end – though it did end with Michelangelo’s last Pieta, a half-finished work of a standing Mary holding her dead son Jesus. Michelangelo’s first Pieta is the more famous, at the Vatican, which he did in his early 20s. This one was done just before he died at age 89. Rick said it was the saddest sculpture he had ever seen – the work of a man losing his powers to create. To me, it looked almost modern, an abstraction of grief and mourning.

We then trooped to the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazia, to see Leonardo’s Last Supper. It had been hard to get tickets, and they had sent all these strict instructions about having to bring our ID, and show up at least 30 minutes before to prove we were who we were and do a temperature check etc. etc. Amy even wore a long dress to make sure we wouldn’t violate the dress codes to cover knees and shoulders. Well, it turns out that none of that was necessary – we were welcome with a shrug and told to wait our turn. So we checked in early and stood around in the blazing sun waiting for our 15 minutes with the great late 15th century masterpiece – a masterpiece that had begun to schlump off the wall where it was painting just a few decades after Leonardo finished it. It’s a miracle the painting – considered the first of the High Renaissance with its perfect naturalism and single-point perspective – survived at all, even narrowly escaping a bomb in WWII. It’s beautiful, though faded and hard to read, but really pops when you stand back. It seems to literally recede into space, giving the illusion that the room extends beyond the wall. The painting has had a huge impact on art ever since, and it was remarkable to actually be in the refectory where he painted it.

Amy and Will then headed out on their own and found a Starbucks in a beautiful old building with a baroque facade, while Rick and I stumbled onto the 3rd-4th century AD ruins of the imperial capital of Ancient Rome when it was in Mediolanum, or Milan. They are right across from where we will have dinner tomorrow. We then wandered into a square with a huge Michelangelo-esque statue of a hand with its middle finger extended. Known as “Il Dito,” the modern sculpture by Maurizio Cattelan appears to be giving the finger to the financial institutions surrounding it, especially the stock exchange building, a post-2008-meltdown Bull of Wall Street. But it could also be that he is flipping off the fascistic architecture of the building itself, which is quite ugly. It also had echoes for me of the famous huge hand of the Emperor Constantine, on view at the Capitoline museums, with its colossal finger pointing up. He was the first to make Christianity legal in the Roman Empire – is there a knock at Christianity too? Who knows? That’s the fun of art – ancient and modern – trying to figure it out.