Milano!

I left Florence this morning, but I haven't yet left Italy.  I came to Italy with the intent to visit three cities: Florence, Rome, and Venice.  I realized, however, that other than the Doge's palace, there really isn't any particular site in Venice that I wanted to see.  The history of Venice is fascinating, throughout the age of the Crusades and into the Renaissance, boasting such famous figures as Marco Polo and Titian, but the city itself didn't really attract me.  At least, not now.  If I were with someone, things might be different, but on my own, I am mostly interested in the concrete history and art history around me.

For those of you who don't pay excruciating detail to my travel schedule, on my way to Florence, I changed trains in Milan, en route from Paris (by way of Zürich).  I don't know too much about the history of Milan, and my main source of knowledge about the city is from Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad.  Although it's been a while since I've mentioned Mark Twain, just as was the case when I arrived in Europe a year ago, I constantly think about how he considered and portrayed his European excursion (were it not for him, the word "beggar" would never appear in any of my blog entries), and I've tried to make this blog a 21st-century version of the Quaker City Letters, of which The Innocents Abroad is mostly a redaction.

So, why not stop in Milan?  With my Hosteling International card, a night in Milan is the same cost as a night in Paris, and I fly out of CDG Airport on August 8th no matter what, so why not spend a day in Milan?

So I took a 2-hour train ride, purchased a map and a 24-hours unlimited public transportation card, took the Metro to the suburbs, dropped my bags off at the Youth Hostel, and went to explore the city.

My first stop was, of course, the Cathedral.  It was the only tourist attraction I knew of before I arrived, and it's also where all of the other tourists were flocking.  It's Sunday, meaning the real flock is also flocking, for Sunday Mass.  Before I even entered, I circled the building once, very slowly.  The exterior ornamentation is so intricate!  It has a very Renaissance feel: there are no flying buttresses, the entire building is built of shining white marble, and the statues everywhere -- everywhere on the outside, are both realistic and highly expressive.  There is almost no empty space, no place where there isn't a gargoyle with a pipe in its mouth, a tormented saint, or a churchman raising his hands in blessing.  Even in the complex veins of the great stained-glass rose on the apse side of the cathedral, statues are seated, with parts of their bodies on the inside, others on the outside, the window pane cutting a dorsoventral axis down their upper bodies (their legs hang down on the inside).  The pointed arches, however, have all the accessories of Gothic Flamboyant architecture: all the tufts, points, and blossoms.  The central tower, above the apse, is currently covered in metal scaffolding, but you can still see a golden bishop hanging on to the steeple.

Because Mass was in session when I visited, tourists such as myself were cordoned off from actual attendees.  Relegated to the edges of the nave, I could see the stained glass and the architecture of the ceiling without disrupting the bishop's sermon.  Perfect.  The inside is also very ornate, although not nearly to the degree that the outside is.  The stained-glass windows looked as if they had all been constructed in different eras: they seemed to vary not only by historic style, but by budget: in several frames, more panes than necessary seemed to have been left colorless.

I left the cathedral, and walked northwest, on my way to the city's second major landmark.  On my way, I passed a mounted statue of Garibaldi, honoring the Risorgimento.  I've seen many such monuments in my brief stay in Italy, it's given me insight into how Italians think about their history.  As I've mentioned, in France, I was surprised to see that the war most commonly honored with monuments was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, followed by World War I.  There are very few statues in memory of World War II (with the exception of the Shoah Memorial in Paris), although there is monument to the French soldiers killed in Vietnam, in Paris, if you know where to look.  Likewise, in Italy, both Milan and Rome have had gargantuan memorials in honor of Victor Emanuel II, the first king of a united Italy, and Florence, too, has a decent-sized memorial to him (he is also one of the few people with the honor to have been interred in the Pantheon in Rome).  The critical years of Italy's political (though by no means cultural or economic) unification, at the end of the 19th century seem to be regarded as the most illustrious days of contemporary Italian history.  French historians define "contemporary history" as "after 1789;" perhaps in Italian historiography, "contemporary" means "after 1870?"

I arrived at the Palazzo Sforzesco.  This is exactly what it sounds like: a palace formerly owned by the Sforza family, including the infamous Ludovico "Il Moro," active in the late 15th century.  It's a real military fortress, well-fortified with towers, a moat, crenelations, etc.  It was built in the first half of the 14th century, and as Milan was serially occupied from the 16th until the 19th century, various foreign powers controlled it, although the architecture and decoration always remained distinctly Lombard.  The story of the fortress's occupants helped refresh me on this contested region of Italy.  The Spanish invaded Milan in the 16th century, and remained there until the early 18th century, when the Austrians (i.e. the former Holy Roman Empire) kicked them out; in 1796, the French, in their early post-revolutionary zeal, seized control, but lost it after the fall of Napoleon in 1814.  The Austrian Empire remained in control, in spite of the Revolutionary hiccup of 1848, nearly right up until the official unification of Italy in 1870.

Remember my observation about how contemporary Florentines milk their city's history for all that it is worth, even charging tourists to enter church interiors?  In Milan, entry to the Palace, its grounds and gardens, and all of its museums, is entirely free of charge.  Also in contrast to Florence, Milan has included detailed descriptions of all of its items on display, sometimes to an overwhelming degree.  Its collections are extensive: everything of historic interest in Lombardy seems to make its way to this single palace, even fragments of wall frescoes.  For this reason, it has several permanent collections, of prehistory, Italian painting, ancient Egypt, 

Seeing the mummies on display on an Italian museum reminded me of one of the most memorable scenes in The Innocents Abroad, in which Mark Twain and his friends decide to annoy their tour guide by pretending to be incredibly stupid.  Allow me to share it with you:

The guide was bewildered-- non-plussed. He walked his legs off, nearly, hunting up extraordinary things, and exhausted all his ingenuity on us, but it was a failure; we never showed any interest in any thing. He had reserved what he considered to be his greatest wonder till the last--a royal Egyptian mummy, the best preserved in the world, perhaps. He took us there. He felt so sure, this time, that some of his old enthusiasm came back to him:

"See, genteelmen!--Mummy! Mummy!"

The eye-glass came up as calmly, as deliberately as ever.

"Ah,--Ferguson--what did I understand you to say the gentleman's name was?"

"Name?--he got no name!--Mummy!--'Gyptian mummy!"

"Yes, yes. Born here?"

"No! 'Gyptian mummy!"

"Ah, just so. Frenchman, I presume?"

"No!--not Frenchman, not Roman!--born in Egypta!"

"Born in Egypta. Never heard of Egypta before. Foreign locality, likely. Mummy--mummy. How calm he is--how self-possessed. Is, ah--is he dead?"

"Oh, sacre bleu, been dead three thousan' year!"

The doctor turned on him savagely:

"Here, now, what do you mean by such conduct as this! Playing us for Chinamen because we are strangers and trying to learn! Trying to impose your vile second-hand carcasses on us!--thunder and lightning, I've a notion to--to--if you've got a nice fresh corpse, fetch him out!--or by George we'll brain you!"

I really, really wish that I could write like that.

Anyway, the Palazzo at Milan is well worth visiting, and still has the personal collections of some of the Sforzas.  They are incredibly proud of having what looks like Ludovico's cocktail glass, as well as numerous chests, coffers, and cabinets, which somehow always manage to survive (perhaps because, unlike metal, they can't be melted down?).  They also have the world's best collection of the artist.  Bramante, a contemporary and acquaintance of Leonardo da Vinci.  The Palace has numerous paintings and engravings by him, and even a series of 12 tapestries, representing the seasons, begun in 1501, prepared for a wedding which Louis XII attended.  Yes, even in Italy, there are two French monarchs I can't seem to escape from: Louis XII and Francois I.  For instance, back in Florence, I saw a wonderful wall-painting of Francois I kneeling in supplication before Pope Leo X. In any case, the curators of the Palazzo Sforzesco had painstakingly organized the 27 rooms of exhibition by chronology and medium.  They have some very well-preserved late-medieval painted wooden sculptures, which is very rare: too many people of "good taste" in later eras decided that painting on wooden sculptures was crass and vulgar, and made no effort to preserve it.  I saw a good collection of 16th- and 17th-century wonderkammer objects, of the kind I've grown used to, visiting so many French mansions.  Although the Italians are not as absolutely obsessed with furniture collection and classification as the French are, I saw a few disgustingly-ornate 17th- and 18th-century tables in Louis-Quatorze and Louis-Quinze styles, although they don't assign them these names.

Then, I noticed that it was about to rain, and I still had a train to book for tomorrow (not to mention food to find) and I left the museum, in a room with austere 17th-century Flemish paintings.

I am thinking of you all!  Love to each and every one of you!

~JD

"Naught displeas'd was she, but smil'd thereat so joyously, that of her laughing eyes the radiance brake and scatter'd my collected mind abroad" (Dante, Divine Comedy, Paradise, Canto X).