Milan and Varese

It was Sunday morning when we checked out of our hotel in Venice and took a water taxi back to our coach for Milan, “the middle” of Italy according to our tour director, Lino.  As we entered the city, he told us that there had been a marathon that morning and he hoped the streets had all been opened again.  A search on my phone confirmed that there had been a race, the Milano21 Half Marathon.  There were some stray runners out on the tree-lined streets, but they were not wearing race bibs so I thought they were just out for a run - it was a perfect morning for it, cool and overcast.

Milan is in Italy's northern Lombardy region, and is known as the capital of fashion and design.  Lino dropped us off at a huge, covered mall, and it was indeed lined with every imaginable high-end clothing store I had ever heard of - Gucci, Prada, Louis Vuitton.  There was also a very good book store, one of the largest that I had seen, and it even had a section of books in English.

The city was crowded, perhaps the usual state of things on a Sunday afternoon or perhaps because of the shopping season.  We enjoyed a very good pizza at a place just around the corner from the big mall, and we saw the gothic Duomo, as well as the most world’s most famous opera house, La Scala, where Maria Callas had performed.

It was a little chilly by now, a big difference from our first days in Italy, and we were all a little glad to see Lino, who took us to the coach waiting around the corner.  We left Milan for Varese, a city in mountainous northern Italy, not from the border to Switzerland  Our hotel was perhaps the most beautiful one we had stayed in, the Palace Grand Hotel, high on a hill overlooking the city.  Our driver, Alberto, somehow made all of the hairpin curves to the top of the hill and earned a round of applause.

Dinner afterward was at a local restaurant in the city, Il Melograno, translated as “The Pomegranate,” because the fruit is grown in this area.