Living Life With Passion & Purpose!
Woke up in the train car after sleeping off the Hofbräuhaus chaos and pulled back the curtain to this foggy view rolling into Milan. I was in Italy. After everything that had happened the day before, it felt like the trip had just taken a whole new turn.
As the train approached the station, I saw this scene out the window.
I don’t know why, but this looked very Italian to me — the laundry hanging out the windows. Rows of apartments stacked tight, old brick next to newer concrete, sheets and shirts drying in the open air. Nothing staged, nothing special, just ordinary Milan life hanging out for anyone to see.
The first place Julie wanted to show me was the Duomo.
Milan’s great cathedral, one of the largest Gothic churches in the world, its façade a forest of spires, statues, and carved stone that took nearly six centuries to complete.
Next, Julie and I went to a local butcher shop to get a turkey for Thanksgiving. Standing in a small Italian shop on a holiday that belonged somewhere else, we picked out the bird that would be our meal.
The butcher was friendly and said he was familiar with this holiday. He told us he always kept a few turkeys set aside for the Americans living in the city
That evening I stood in front of the cathedral and photographed the people at its base so the sculptures would have some scale. The figures were life-size and bigger than life-size, towering over everyone below.
Castello Sforzesco is the great fortress in the heart of Milan, built in the 1400s by the Sforza dukes and later turned into a complex of museums. Fog and streetlight turned its massive round tower into something almost unreal that night, rising out of the mist.
