for those of you who I didn't get the chance to tell yet: I'm living abroad again! After working in Düsseldorf for a year, I got the chance to go abroad for a trainee placement until mid-July. The new job in the "old" company is in Varese, an Italian town near Milano that I hadn't heard of before. But getting the chance to live in Italy for a few months sounded pretty sweet, so needless to say: I didn't hesitate and immediately started packing.
To start the new adventure, Jannes and I arrived in Milano during Easter holidays, one week before the start of my new job. Since we had a few days off, it was a great chance to get accumulated to Italian life and do some sightseeing before working again.
Though I had been to Italy a few times before, I never considered Milano as a tourist destination, so it was my first time actually visiting the city. We stayed in a B&B near the central station, a bit outside of the old-town center, but public transport turned out to be very reliable, so we never had any issues travelling around the city. On our first day, we were quite unlucky because it was raining a lot. We mainly walked around the city, had some delicious food and visited one of the numerous art museums.
We started our tour at the famous Duomo: the cathedral that took over six centuries to build and is still a "work in progress". Since there was a huge queue that day, we decided to visit the inside another time.
From the Duomo we continued to walk through the impressive structure of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, one of the oldest shopping malls in the world.
After visiting an art museum, near the La Scala opera house, we had some lunch and headed to the Sforzesco castle. Despite the bad weather, we had some gelato...
At one of the castle's museums, we wanted to visit the Last Supper painting. However we found out that it is only possible to view the Last Supper painting by making a reservation a few weeks in advance. Deciding to come back for another museum the next day, we took a short rest at the hostel. Then we went to the Navigli neighborhood, consisting of a few canals lined with some of Milano's best restaurants and bars. While it was of course not as impressive as the canals of Venice, it still had a very nice flair and I enjoyed some delicious (though quite expensive) Swordfish ravioli.
On our second day, we were surprised by the sun, which was a great coincidence, since we had decided to participate in a three hour (it took even longer) city tour. It was a very enjoyable tour with a funny guide, who knew a lot about Milan and its history, made even more enjoyable by the fact that it was a free tour.
We basically saw a lot of the same sights as the day before. Only this time, we actually learned about the background of what we were seeing. Here are some pictures from the tour.
Typical square in Milano: the architecture is very different from Roman cities. This is a city where medieval and modern buildings meet.
Some very subtle, hidden street art:
This was one of the highlights of the tour: a small chapel called San Bernardino alle Ossa. Our guide took us into a back-room of the church and it took me a minute to figure out that the unusual wall decoration of the room was actually hundreds of small human skulls stacked on top of each other! Apparently this was due to this room being the cemetery of hundreds of patients of a nearby hospital in the middle ages. Creepy...
Another highlight of the tour: the old town square with a lot of Roman buildings. By letting Jannes and I communicate to each other though we were far apart, our guide demonstrated a very weird architectural phenomenon called "wispering gallery" that can be observed under some specially shaped domes. It really seems so strange, if you ever get the chance, try it!
We ended our tour in front of the Milan stock exchange: and were surprised by this dominating sculpture in front of it. Apparently, a few years ago a famous modern artist from Milan promised to give the city a free sculpture as a gift. And, well, he decided to put this symbolic gesture in front of the stock exchange. To me, this really shows that Milan is different from most other big Italian cities: rather than showcasing it's history, Milan more often decides to look for new and futuristic art, buildings, sculptures.
After our tour was finished, we decided to spend the afternoon at Sforzesco castle again. We had some more gelato, but this time, the weather was actually appropriate. Then we strolled through the nearby Parco Sempione, just enjoying the first rays of sun this spring. Amazing!
Then we visited the sculpture museum in the castle and Michelangelo's last, unfinished sculpture, the Rondanini Pieta.
Finally we even managed to visit the inside of the Duomo. So huge!
In the evening, we decided to go up to Milan's most modern part of town, Porta Garibaldi and to participate in the most typical Milanese evening activity: the Aperitivo. It's basically pre-dinner drinks that include a typical Italian cocktail, such as "Spritz", accompanied by a small "all-you-can-eat" tapas buffet. While we enjoyed the whole experience, the bar we had chosen seemed a bit too posh, fashionable and high-class to us (still sweaty from the day's activities). So, we decided to grab some dinner at a nearby restaurant that served only dishes from the Parma region. I managed to find one dish without meat on the menu: Melanzane alla Parmigiana. Delicious!
The next day, the weather was pretty bad again. And for some reason my energy level was very low... So we had a long brunch at a cute cafe in the student neighborhood of Milan and walked through a park that was nothing special. After a while I started feeling really exhausted and tired, so we went home. I had to lie down and it took me all afternoon to recover... However, in the evening I regained some strength, so we decided to go out for dinner in our neighborhood. While it wasn't the nicest neighborhood, we found a posting about a sushi restaurant on trip adisor that sounded quite promising. And let me tell you: while the restaurant seemed quite tacky (Chinese music playing in the background with some non-definable, brightly colored decorations), the food was the most delicious we had during our whole stay! A glorious choice of sushi, all within an "all-you-can-eat" budget of 20 euro. Almost impossible to believe that the food could be good, but it really was! Later, the chef came to talk to us and it turned out that it was in fact a fusion restaurant of Japanese sushi and Sicilian seafood. Though it doesn't sound like it, this is the perfect combination!
The next morning, we already had to leave Milan and headed out to Varese by train. We were actually positively surprised by the welcome we got: Valeria, my "landlady" picked us up at the train station and brought us to my new home for the month: a holiday apartment that was next to the villa she was living in with her youngest daughter. I'm quite happy about the place and Valeria is a very open and friendly hostess (she took me to the supermarket by car, lent me her bike for trips through Varese, she even invited me for dinner once). The next morning Jannes had to take the plane back to Germany and I was alone in Varese. Before I could get sad about this, I had to head out, to my first day at work...
Anyways, that's it for now. In the next post I will tell you a bit about life and work in Varese!
