The Sirens of Organized Travel…
Floating Nursing Homes…
Travel to Europe as Nostos…
Milan’s Bus-Barker Top Four…
The Famous Duomo…
Two days in Milan is risibly inadequate, of course. But having landed there, it seemed absurd to decamp immediately. Since a city of Milan’s size and importance requires from two to three weeks to explore, even peremptorily, a two-day stay is at least a clear disavowal of any pretense to having “done” it–of the sort, that is, affected by so many tourists on their return from ten-day, twelve-city Mediterranean cruises, during which all that they have “done” is to glimpse through the windows of their tour buses some of the beautiful things they haven’t seen. An elderly acquaintance of mine, too possessed of irony to have allowed himself to be seduced by the Sirens of Organized Travel, described his itinerary as follows: “We spent an afternoon in London during which we did not see Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, and the Tower, then were woken up the next morning in Paris, herded onto another bus, and did not see the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and Sacre-Coeur. And everyone was thrilled not to have seen them.”
Odysseus devoted more time to exploring the cave of the man-eating Cyclops than the average group tour spends in European capitals today. Hence, Mrs. P and I have always disdained organized travel—hence, our travel has always been as chaotically disorganized as this memoir attests—, and disdained above all the modern cruise, in which the traveler’s every move is planned, and his every need taken care of. The contemporary cruise ship is a gigantic floating nursing home. (I’ve seen brochure photos of happy trenchermen in the ship’s “formal” dining room, where cravats are no longer required, having been replaced by bibs.) In our late-sixties, we are much too young for such geriatric conveyances. We prefer risk and adventure, of the sort that might reduce us to knocking at the door of a Lacedaemonian youth hostel at midnight outside of Bologna, or force us to sleep in our rental car at Linate Airport the night before our return flight (see below). No cruise-ship octogenarian will ever experience such thrills, or be able to regale his great-grandchildren with the harrowing tales of how he survived them.
As we walked under the arch of the Porta Ticinese and filed past a magnificent row of Roman and Early Christian columns, it occurred to me once again that no matter where in the West one resides, by accident of birth or other circumstance, a trip to Europe is a nostos, a voyage home. I do not refer in this regard to those questers after their “roots” who leave their farmsteads in Manitoba, their bayous in Mississippi, or their brownstones in Manhattan, in search of the ancestral villages in Ukraine, the Pyrenees, or Poland in which their great-great-grandfathers once lived. Theirs is merely an investigation into the lineage of the body, a biological nostalgia on a par with the homing instinct of salmon who return by natural compulsion to the exact spot on which they were spawned. The more conscious traveler to Europe, on the other hand, knows that he is drawn there by a far more powerful attractive force, as to the birthplace of the Western soul.
Milan is a relatively “young” Italian city, the original Celtic settlement having been subdued by the Romans as late as the early third century B.C. Under Diocletian, it became the seat of the rulers of the Western Empire, and in 313, Constantine published his famous Edict of Milan, giving Christians the freedom to worship (which most modern Italians, like most moderns everywhere, fail deliberately to exercise or defend). In 375, Ambrose, one of the most learned of the Latin Fathers, and a direct influence upon the thought of Augustine, became Milan’s bishop and patron saint. Since then, the Lombard capital has passed under the rule and patronage of Charlemagne, the Visconti, the Sforzas, the Emperor Charles V, the Borromeos, Napoleon, and Il Duce, all of whom it managed to survive, while attracting to its courts such luminaries as Da Vinci, Bramante, Manzoni, and Verdi.
Milan’s most famous monuments—the ones every bus-tour barker would be sure to include on his itinerary—are the Duomo, La Scala, the Galleria, and Leonardi’s Last Supper (in the cenacolo of the church of Sta Maria della Grazie). And since this is a memoir rather than a travel guide, we’ll give them the same short shrift. The Duomo is impossible to miss even if one wanted to: an enormous and uniquely soul-less Gothic pile. Construction commenced (with the chevet) in the late trecento by Gian Galeazzo Visconti, and continued throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries under a succession of Italian, French, and German master masons, before the Duomo’s façade was only finally finished in 1809. The great Gothic cathedrals of Europe typically take decades, and sometimes centuries, to complete; but the nearly half-millennium during which the planners and builders of the Duomo tinkered should have persuaded them that it would never be more than a limited architectural success. It is not that the Duomo is a chaotic agglomeration of styles, since only the façade combines Gothic and Renaissance motives (and remarkably harmoniously at that), whereas the rest of the building is pure flamboyant Gothic. But then the International Gothic Style may be rare in Italy for good reasons, as opposed to northern France and Britain, where its verticality, monochromaticism, and a-symmetry seem more at home. In any case, the Duomo remains inscrutable to both the eye and the mind, mainly because a dense forest of pinnacles, belfries, and gables obscure its every surface. One architectural historian, with only a slight lack of charity, said that it resembles an albino porcupine. (It is no coincidence that the principal cause of the building’s deterioration over the years has been neither invading armies, nor failing mortar, nor pollution, but nesting pigeons.)
Across the vast Piazza Del Duomo, nearly side by side, stand the elegant Teatro alla Scala and the Galleria, temples to music and retail commerce respectively, as the Duomo tries but fails to be a temple to Christ. But ours is a multicultural world, and as Mrs. P and I tried to cross the square, our way was barred for over an hour by a kilometer-long procession, replete with pastel-coloured floats adorned with images of Hindu gods and goddesses. The Hare Krishna, which we’d managed to avoid in all three airports, had come to meet us in Milan’s centro istorico.