I'd only been to Milan once before. I liked it then, and this time I liked it even more. We flew down on AirBerlin the morning after the Britten War Requiem, from another one of Berlin's fabulous museums - the Tegel Airport Museum, a real live interactive museum where you can go and walk around, have you luggage checked, and actually get on a plane that takes off. Which is disappointing really, for you get the feeling after being there for an hour that it'll be an airship you'll be walking to once you clear the gate *.
On the evening we arrived, Derek suggested we meet at the canal district for pizza and we clackety-clacked down on the tram. The canals, of which only a few remain, go back all but a thousand years, once connecting the rivers and lakes of Lombardy, and were far more useful for transport than perilous roads. They shipped the great marble blocks for the Duomo down by canal.
Now lively and touristy, the Navigli has been awakened by restaurants and bars ...
... and we wandered along, over a bridge, veering away into the back streets, the sun now low, till we reached Deb's favorite - a large outdoor mozzarella pizza restaurant, with the soccer playing on a huge screen at one end.
That first night air was deceptive. Milan was hot and getting hotter, stone and concrete and treeless stone roads absorbing the beating sun, radiating it back into the creeping afternoon shade.
Bitumen footpaths, in Via Montenapoleone and other posh Vias, like Via Manzoni, were softening, dented by high heels and with little black ripples of summers past. But inside, things were uber cool.
It was the death of Alessandro Manzoni, writer, poet and unification patriot, that so aggrieved Verdi that in memoriam he wrote his Requiem which premiered (May 22 1874) one year after Manzoni's death in the Church of St Marco. Three days later the second performance was at La Scala.
Via Manzoni runs north from Piazza della Scala. Once known as the 'Road of the Gardens', which the rich and noble would favour for its closeness to the newly prestigious theatre and there live with magnificent internal gardens, it's a narrow road of closely opposed Neoclassical facades.
In search of the gardens, head for Museo Poldi Pezzoli, where, after never enough time with the collection, you may glimpse through a closed scrim a shady green sanctuary still in private hands.
Or in the Brera district, behind Scala, whose little streets are becoming pedestrianised and flush with cafes and restaurants, there's a hint of green in the Piazzeta di Brera ...
... and a glimpse of Napoleon in the Palazzo Brera where students at the Pinacoteca huddle in the shade.
Pressed against the wall of Santa Maria della Grazie, people wait for their time slot for entry to see The Last Supper.
35 degrees was 35 felt like 45. If I'd been in Tokyo I'd have run up the umbrella, but this was fashion capital of the world, with fashion week about to begin, where the immaculately groomed men in suits and white shirts were lean, tanned, Italian man tanned (it's a colour all of its own) and completely at ease, and smoking. Gelataria couldn't scoop it up fast enough, coconut pieces were kept moist under chilled water on stands in the Piazza del Duomo,
and the Galleria was a refuge for tourists to gawk at each other.
We had no sooner taken a table inside, with just a hint of air movement, planning water and coffee and rested feet, when J spotted us. We'd been drinking late at her hotel the night before, so lunch was on us. The porcini were fresh and divine. The risotto from god's kitchen. The bill from hell.
If we were getting weary, the Europeans were taking it in their stride. The spring had been cool and damp, and fashion week was fashion week and the sun was a blessing, as models and camera crews soaked it up in Piazza dell Scala (yes, there's trees there).
And several underground train stops away was 'Casa Verdi', the house that Verdi built (and where he is buried, with Guiseppina Strepponi; he died in the Grand Hotel di Milan in Via Manzoni) for retired singers and musicians who "had not been favoured by fortune, or who when they were young did not have the virtue of saving their money. Poor and dear companions of my life."
It is beautifully and lovingly portrayed in Il Bacio di Tosca.
But, but , but the real reason we were in Milan, was La Scala
whose spooky night doors would open four times for us.
* The new Brandenburg airport, years behind schedule and massively over budget, is slated to open this year. Rush to Tegel while you can. Along with Milanese trams, these wonderful working relics of times long gone won't last.
