On to Milan!

We got an early start on our trip to Milan, leaving our Casale Monferrato Airbnb at 6:30am sharp.

(We booked a Duomo tour in Milan for 9am.  Due to a bad case of Vacation Brain, we booked the tour for 9am Saturday instead of 9am Sunday, so we had to break camp early in Casale Monferrato in order to make it to Milan in time.  We arrived at the Duomo at 9am sharp just in time for our tour.)

We walked up the stairs to the rooftop of the Duomo and did the rooftop tour (I think about 280 steps, check my Strava ;-)).

Here is the Duomo from ground level.

We also did the Duomo interior tour, here is St Bartholomew (flayed alive wearing his skin, gotta love religious art).

And a more traditional church image.

Afterwards we went to Luini's for a snack (on instructions from Emiliano).

Then a walkabout town looking for lunch.

After lunch we went to the Duomo museum (we had the Duomo "multipass" and were squeezing out all the value).  The museum had models of literally thousands of the sculptures that comprised the Duomo and they were all very different, it was really a very impressive display.  There were also some images of the stained glass (looking for some ideas for a stained glass piece for myself).

The most impressing thing for me was a scale model of the Duomo itself, you can really appreciate all the detail in the construction.

In the evening we met my colleague Emiliano for an introduction to Milano life - drinks and apperitivo's!

That was just day 1!!!

On our second day in Milan we did a lot of walking!  We decided to see the art gallery, so we took a walk past the Duomo (again) ...

And through the "Rinascente Milano Piazza Duomo" (basically a big mall, you can see it to the left above) ...

All the stores are high-end designers, and there are lineups to get into each store, and security guards at each store managing the traffic.

We didn't get into the art gallery unfortunately, because it was sold out for the day.  (Hot tip - pretty much anywhere you go in Europe check if you can buy tickets online in advance.)

We had some gigantic pizzas for lunch (neither Sonya nor Shelley is going to be able to face pizza now for the rest of the trip) and then took a walk through some non-tourist areas to admire Milan architecture.

In the evening we did a boat canal cruise, which was a bit of a bust (hop tip - spend your 57 Euros on literally ANYTHING else) however we did see a bunch of people sitting by the canal, so that's where we wandered over to after the cruise.

(Sonya bought 2 new dresses at a market, which is so far the highlight of her holiday, check out one of her purchases below.)

 

The next day we broke camp and headed "home" to Bonneville.  We stopped in Aosta (small Italian town about an hour from the Mont Blanc tunnel) for lunch and some sightseeing.  All the castles were closed unfortunately (because ...  Monday?) but we say this old ruin in town.

This is a view of the mountains from downtown Aosta.  Beautiful small towns like this are a dime a dozen over here.

We arrived back in Bonneville with some rain in the forecast, I'll update our Bonneville adventures in my next post!