Palaces and Paintings

This morning started out with a little bit of sleeping in and a hotel breakfast. Then my dad headed out to his last confirmed meeting of the trip and my mom and I planned our our day. Then I went on a run on the treadmill. I watched Food Network to entertain myself because I could see what was happening even if I couldn’t understand. Turns out the actually stuff on the channel is the same as in the US, but there are Italian voice overs. After I showered my mom and I headed out to the Castello Sforzesco, the castle the Sforza dynasty lived in durning the renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci even designed the defense system.

Once we got out of the metro we realized how hungry we were and stopped for some lunch. Experimenting with unknown foods, we ordered something that seemed like might have been fried pizza, but when it arrived it was kind of like bread cooked in a skillet type thing.

After linch, we managed to get into the castle for free, which was an added bonus, to the enormous museums inside the castle. There were seven museums in the castle ranging from furniture, musical instruments (some were really strange), and statues, to armor, paintings, and tomb stones. The tombstones left me to wonder how long it took for grave robbing to become archeology. The museum also housed Michelangelo’s greatest unfinished masterpiece, the Rondanini Pietá. My mom and I decided he could do much better and if you talked something up enough everyone would want to see it. The masterpiece was very unfinished and Jesus’ legs were the only things that seemed close to done. It was cool nonetheless. Feeling a bit thirsty we headed to a cafe in the castle and got some water and a pastry that ended up being a biscuit.

We then walked out of the castle, across the draw bridge and moat, and ended up in a huge, beautiful park. At the end of the park there was an arc depicting Napoleon’s defeat that almost mirrored the Arc de Triumph in Paris. We walked all of the way down to it on our way to see Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. We thought we got lost on the walk there and asked a random passerby, who’s language we didn’t know. Luckily for us he spoke English like he was from the US and told us the correct way to get to the painting. When we did finally arrive we met up with a friend from Colorado who is also in Milan, Scott. Getting tickets to see The Last Supper was a bit difficult because we didn't realize you needed to get tickets so far in advance, up to three months.

My mom was able to find a tour for us to take though so we were lucky. The painting was amazing! It turns out it was painted in a cafeteria for monks in a monastery. The painting was quite damaged because da Vinci used non-resilient paint, the monks wanted a bigger door so they cut off Jesus’s feet, the heat from the kitchen, and a WWII bomb. I feel really lucky to have been able to see the painting in any condition, which I never thought I would. We were shooed out after 15 minutes so the next group could go in, so the four of us headed to a bar to pass the time before restaurants opened for dinner.

When we decided it was safe to assume the restaurants were open, we walked to one called Taverna Moriggi. It was a challenge to find and when we finally did it happened to be closed for renovation. We moved on and walked to another restaurant, which was too busy to seat us. However it was worth the walk because we stumbled upon some ruins of one of the Roman Empire’s major capitals. We ended up finding a restaurant called Da Rita e Antonio, which was primarily a pizza place, but we all had pasta and Scott and my dad had fish too. I can guarantee the fish was fresh because one of the servers brought both of the fish, the entire fish, to the table to show us what fish they would be eating before it was cooked. The food was delicious and we left on full stomachs. It was really fun to be able to spend time with Scott, we seem to be bumping into friends in countries all over the world.