McToast

After we bid a sleepy goodbye to the rest of our college group at 3a.m., as they piled onto a bus to the airport from Parma, Kayla and I began the next stage of our adventures abroad: venturing out on our own. We would stick together until Rome, where Kayla would meet up with her mom, and I would meet up with my friend Kennan, and then we would part ways. Instead of going directly to Rome, however, we decided to make a stop in Milan: we planned to take a train from Parma to Milan, spend the day and a night there, then fly to Rome on a cheap local flight. Giacomo arranged a taxi for us to the Parma train station, as his parting gift, so we didn’t have to drag all our luggage from hotel to bus to terminal to station on our own (we still had quite the time with the stairs at the train station though). We arrived in Milan around 10a.m, but did not anticipate the walk to our hostel from the station- Google maps told us optimistically that it would only take 25 minutes to walk, but it did not add our 120lb of baggage into the equation. Roughly an hour later, we finally dropped our bags off at our hostel and ventured out into the city once again. Our first stop was much-needed food, and I’m somewhat ashamed to say we went to McDonald’s. However, Italian McDonalds have one redeeming feature on their menu: McToast. This euro-menu item is simply a grilled ham and Swiss sandwich, but in Italy even McDonald’s ham is fairly good quality, and the McToast is comfortingly like something I would make for myself at home. And so Kayla and I set out to see the sights of Milan, scarves wrapped tightly around our necks and warm McToasts in our hands. From there, we walked everywhere. We saw all the usual things every Italian city has to offer (castle, gigantic cathedrals, open city piazzas), but also stumbled upon two exhibitions of Da Vinci’s sketches. We originally sought out The Last Supper, which is tucked away in a small but highly ornate church in the middle of a residential area of the city, but found that tickets were sold out for the rest of the day (15-minute slots must be reserved ahead of time, and only 15 people are allowed in every 15 minutes). Around the back of the little church, however, was another chapel which held (for 6 euro entrance fee) a random assortment of Da Vinci’s original sketches, carefully pressed between glass, in climate-controlled glass cases. Kayla and I wandered from sketch to sketch, at first in awe of the mere fact that we were looking at originals, then amused by the spontaneity within the sketches. Here is a precisely drawn automatic crossbow that can shoot eight arrows at a time, and can be reloaded faster than any other weapon of the time- but what’s this? It looks as if Leonardo has doodled a person swimming around in the upper left-hand corner, with some sort of snorkel device. And here is a to-scale catapult, capable of flinging flaming balls of rock and exploding debris at the enemy- just, er, pay no attention to that horse frolicking in a pasture off to the side. Either the great Renaissance Man reused his sketch paper, or his mind often wandered away from his commissioned projects. I prefer to believe the latter.

As we left the little chapel full of sketches, the ticket lady pointed out that our ticket would also get us into another art museum near by, where there was another exhibit of Da Vinci sketches, as well as many other collections of Renaissance art. Even though it was beginning to get dark and we felt like we’d walked almost every street in the entire city, we decided to go check it out. The little museum had quite an impressive collection, including a signature Da Vinci painting, but the high point of our visit there was the library: the dim, cool room was three stories tall and lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves, every one full of books, and most locked behind glass. It was the classic ancient library, rolling ladder and balconies and marble busts of famous bearded men and all, and to add the finishing touch, the center of the room held the second collection of Da Vinci sketches. I wanted badly to take photos of the room itself, but the museum’s proctors were stern and forbidding, and the “no photos” sign was blatantly apparent on the door (even if it was in Italian).

After the museum, we decided to call it a night, heading straight back to our hostel except for a brief stop at a grocery store for dinner- yesterday’s bakery rolls, some fresh mozzarella, pesto, and a tomato for each of us. We had a picnic of sorts in bed, then set our alarms for 4a.m. (for our flight at 7) and went to sleep.