It has been only a couple of hours since I got back in Albania after my two-day trip to Milan, Italy. If I could put the whole experience in a fews words they would be “amazing and intense”.
Two days are truly a short time for such a great city, but luckily I found all the time I needed to visit the places that I had set up to like the Piazza del Duomo and the Teatro La Scala. Both these sites were connected by the Vitorio Emmanuele II Gallery, which was just another unique architecture in itself.
The Duomo
The massive and tall pillars of the Duomo were what impressed me right away as I entered its doors. The huge space inside seemed almost as inexhaustible but so was the amount of detailed work that had gone into all the different features of the building, both inside and out. Truly impressive.
La Scala
The La Scala theater, was truly very close to the Duomo. The building was not that impressive from the outside. Unfortunately I did not get to go in since it was closed at the time that I went. Nevertheless, a guy standing outside did offer me to buy some tickets for the performance that same night, however the price was 5 times higher, at 50 Euro. So my suggestion would be to either reserve them in advance or buy them directly at the ticket counter.
The Last Supper
One other place that I had not thought I would have been to visit was what our Italian guests referred to simply as “The Last Supper”. Meaning, the painting by Leonardo Da Vinci of the last supper of Jesus and His disciples. Also a very unique experience for me as I got to learn a lot about the history of this painting and the fact that Leonardo had not used “the right” technique to paint the afresko (painted mural) therefore causing it to disintegrate with time. There were many interesting details, which I am not going to go into here, but to say that the restauration work had gone on for 21 years, a work which was mainly devoted to taking off the more than 7 layers of additional paint that was used to try and maintain the colors of the original painting from fading out.
No pictures were allowed, so I could not do much about it. Moreover, there were strict regulation in place to try and preserve the painting, like no more than 25 visitors at a time were allowed to enter the room and this could happen only every 15 minutes. The cost to enter was relatively cheap, at about 6.5 Euro, for something that is worth so much more.
“The Last Suppe” I’ve always dreamed of taking a look at the real thing, after watching The Da Vinci Code it made me wonder a lot. That was probably quite an experience being able to look such an old painting.