Alive and Well

It is Monday morning, we have left Milan, and I am sitting in our apartment in the small town of Argengno on the western shore of Lake Como.  That is pronounced Ar jen yo.  It is a wonderful landscape scenery of a narrow mountain valley with small towns of melon colored houses with red tile roofs tucked into the shoreline.  Quite a change from the big city of Milan.

We arrived in Milan on Wednesday evening with no problems for the flight, all the luggage accounted for, picked up a rather surprisingly roomy rental car and with the handy iPhone map app made it to the beautiful and trendy Baglioni Hotel.  We deposited out bags into the quite snug room and even though it was 10 at night headed out for some wandering, wine and a bite to eat.  The Hotel is in the middle of “the Shopping District” which is street after street of every clothing store and designer boutique you could imagine.  We noticed that there were workers preparing and changing displays in a number of store front windows and thought it odd for such a time of day to still be at it.   Thursday started with a self- guided tour of the Duomo cathedral in the heart of the city and just a short quarter mile or so walk away.  What an amazingly designed and decorated church.  Supposedly the second largest after Saint Peters in Rome the interior is impressive but dark, but it is rather the exterior that is the most impressive feature.   I am certain that there is a statistic some place that could tell me the correct count but there are literally hundreds of carved marble statues of the Who’s Who in the Catholic religion.  Toss in a few dozen Popes, a hundred or so gargoyles, and a steady heap of angels, lots and lots of fancy scroll work and columns and it is stunning to think of the amount of human labor that the building has consumed over the centuries.  Napoleon was crowned king of Italy here and ordered that the exterior be designed and work begun.   The balance of the daylight hours we walked through the gorgeous Galleria, another landmark of Milan, found the La Scala theater where we will be attending the opera in a few weeks and then headed back to the hotel to freshen up for the evening.  It is in the upper 80s and a day of walking requires a fresh shirt for the evening.

Thursday evening we found out why the window workers had been so busy.  It was Vogue’s Fashion Evening in Milan.  All the stores stay open late just this one night and the place was electric with throngs of people, fashion models handing out flyers, club dance music spilling out of stores and even a live window model at an upscale lingerie store!  Did I ever say how much I like window shopping???!!  There were people everywhere and Laura and I smartly found a small table with a great view, ordered a bottle of wine, surprised?, and relaxed and watch the street scene go by.  We were very impressed that even though there were easily 30,000 people out on the street the scene was amazingly well behaved and very friendly.

Friday we spent most of the morning popping into a few churches on our way across town to the Sforza castle and mid-day pizza and wine stop.  We ‘shopped’ for a hotel for our opera return trip and then back to the hotel to organize for the Saturday departure to begin the stay up at Lake Como and settle into one spot for 5 weeks.