Ah, Milan.
“I almost had my purse stolen,” said Rae Ann Swanson.
“Definitely a New York vibe,” said Kari Grieman.
“All the bustle,” agreed Shaun Riley. “But that cathedral was something else.”
The Saints abroad had rolled into the teeming city in late morning. The better neighborhoods’ broad streets were shaded by graceful acacia trees; the less prosperous spackled with graffiti (one proclamation in English: “Half of everything is luck.”).
Everywhere it was clear that the streets offer motorists only temporary moments of mobility between permanent gridlock. We watched chic pedestrians making better progress than we were in our bus.
Guide Petra, an Austrian, mused upon the fashion capital’s style.
“Even in those silly Smart cars –” a hilariously tiny urban car designed by Swatch and engineered by Mercedes – “Italian men with their sunglasses and slicked back hair and their elbow out the window just so, they still manage to look good, no? In something the size of a washing machine! It’s a talent, let’s admit it.”
She gave a little laugh.
“And the women manage to look graceful going across cobblestones in stiletto heels. I’d probably break my neck.”
Some of us went bank to bank to bank in search of one that would take our dollars for Swiss francs (a future destination being Switzerland, which doesn't belong to the European Union and so doesn't use Euros). Some of us patronized the famous Galleria area of shops.
Beyond shopping, and the nearby La Scala opera house, the city’s tourism magnet is the world’s fourth-largest Catholic church. Police eye you at the main doors, and in the gloom of the great cathedral all the incongruities of sacred tourism are on display. People shuffle around slack-jawed with audio handsets glued to their heads like an extra appendage. Many barely glance around before raising an arm and rorating slowly, phones and cameras hoisted to take photos and 360-video. Cell phones chirp; their owners un-self-consciously answer and carry on conversations.
The architecture is a queasy overlay of centuries worth of styles, all excessive. The admission fees to the basement and to the roof taste of commerce.
And yet – and yet…
You notice that priests take confession from kneeling penitents on one side. On the other side, hundreds of votive candles gleam before praying faithful. In a small chapel a young man appears to be having an ecstatic experience before an image of Mary, raising his hands, rocking in his seat and murmuring.
Half luck, we are told. All of it part of the daily routine of urban Italy circa 2007.
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