The two old Italian women watched me as I heaved my suitcase up the stairs of the Loreto Metro in Milan.
“That poor woman!” they said in Italian. “She has so much to carry and there’s no lift.”
Well, actually, I only recognized the word for woman and the word for lift: ascensore. But I was pretty sure that they had said something like the sentences above, because their gestures and grimaces were so sympathetic.
I smiled at them and struggled on.
Of course they might have said, “That fat woman could really use a lift.”
The only reason that I knew the word for lift is that it is a buzz word for any traveller arriving with bulging bags in a new city. Along with “wifi”, which the Germans call W-Lan and the Parisians weefee. Wifi is more important to me than a lift, but at that moment the power of google was the last thing on my mind. I was regretting all those books I’d bought in Berlin and the self-indulgent purchases in all the other cities.
This was our last move, other than going to the airport to fly home. It was a corker: three trains and seven hours of travel. Normally I’d enjoy sitting on a train doing nothing, but it was hot – breathless, sticky, merciless heat – and the air conditioner in the second train didn’t work.
When we finally arrived at our hotel in Milan, the very one we had stayed in 80 days ago at the beginning of our trip, it was pleasant and familiar. There was an old wood-panelled lift (capacity: 225kg) and there was free wifi.
The only thing lacking was air conditioning. If I had to travel for long in this heat, that would become the phrase to learn in multiple languages. But as it is, we only have to survive for five days before we fly back to the Australian winter.
I can hardly wait.
They sell lots of shoes in Milan but these ones are made of chocolate. They were on the gourmet floor in the department store called La Rinascente.
I had almost forgotten the Italians’ proclivity for small cars and cosy parking.
A bike at the Sforza Castle
One of the Sforza Castle’s towers
The view from our hotel window at 7.30 at night. The little market opened for business early in the morning. You can just see the entrance to the Metro at the bottom of the picture.
You walk out of the Duomo Metro and there it is – a majestic sight. The Milan Duomo is surrounded by shops, cafés and department stores. Even parts of its surface are given over to commerce, as the photo above shows. But wherever you go in that area, you catch glimpses of the Duomo around corners and through alleyways. Its quiet grandeur dominates the landscape, despite the hawkers trying to make you buy their wares, the high-end shops, La Rinascente (the department store), the tourists, the pigeons and the McDonald’s just a few hundred metres away.
