A Fortnight in Italy, Part 5

Milano
The last city we visited had our last major art experience. We went to see The Last Supper in the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, and it was bigger than I thought it would be. You buy your tickets in advance, and when you pick them up they tell you to come back about ten minutes before your entrance time. First you wait, in a group of about 25 people, in a room off the foyer; then you all go into another small waiting room for a minute, then another one; and in each room the doors open automatically before you file in and then close automatically and pause a moment before the next set of doors opens. It’s like an airlock. I was a little surprised they didn’t try to disinfect us somehow. Finally they let you into the old refectory, where The Last Supper is on one wall and a painting of the Crucifixion is opposite it. It’s pretty amazing to see the stylistic differences between the two paintings. The Crucifixion scene looks very medieval compared to the more famous one. In The Last Supper I liked James, whose arms are spread out and looks like he’s saying, “Wait, what?” in response to Jesus.

Practical tip: If you need internet and your hotel/hostel doesn’t provide it, there’s a bookstore with internet access on the Piazza Duomo. Go in, buy an internet card (€5 for an hour) at the cashier, and take it up to the second floor to use the computer while looking at the Duomo.

Real tip: Go to the roof of the Duomo. This is not a tower, this is walking around on the actual freaking roof. It was fantastic. I never knew I wanted to walk around the roof of a cathedral until I was up there. The views of the city are fine; the views of the architecture are the best. I mean, how many times do you get to look down at a Gothic window? I loved that I could hear the organ and smell the incense up there, even though I was outside.
Milan has a monumental cemetery and I nearly went there just to have gone to a cemetery in every city we spent at least a whole day in. By the time we got to Milan, though, I was burnt out on traveling and sick to boot, so I chose not to visit the cemetery. I’m very grateful that we didn’t get sick until the end of the trip.

And Home
Coming home was easy—so easy that at one point Robin said, “Something has to go wrong.” But nothing did, from Milan all the way back to Tisovec. The EU and the Schengen Zone make traveling easy, but anticlimactic; no one so much as looked at us funny in the Bratislava airport, let alone checked our passports.

And now, in a month I will be on “spring” break, on a trip three years in the making, where my passport will definitely get stamped and I’ll make up for the lack of castles visited in Italy.