Briefly in Milan

We got an early morning start Sunday, checking out of our Siena apartment at 7:30, catching the 8:10 bus to Florence, arriving with an hour to spare at the Florence railroad station for the ride to Milan. When we traveled through the Po valley Steve noted how flat the terrain is, and in consequence how low the clouds were hanging.

We're spending two nights in a good small hotel, where our room is perfectly nice, but small, and the cost per night is about 50 percent more than our daily cost for the VRBO rental apartment in Siena, which had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room and a full kitchen. (The apartment of course did not offer maid service and a breakfast buffet, but that hardly makes up the difference!) The hotel is located a few blocks from the Piazza del Duomo, "Milan's living room," where people of all descriptions and categories can be seen hanging out at all times, so that's where we went for our first outing.

The Duomo is a vast Gothic-style cathedral, one of the largest in the world: it can hold over 40,000 people. Its construction started in 1386 and was not completed until 1813; when Napoleon was about to be crowned King of Italy in 1805, the facade was still unfinished, and he ordered that it be completed and said that the French treasury would reimburse the church for what it cost. The facade was thus finished in under seven years, though the French never did pay for it.

There are 3,159 pieces of sculpture in the structure, and of these, 2,245 are on the exterior, along with 96 gargoyles and 135 spires. The church has a main nave with two side aisles on each side, separated by a forest of marble-sheathed columns with capitals featuring interesting scenes of human figures.

These attract the eye upward (in a spiritual way, was the original idea I'm sure) even though it's difficult to figure out what stories exactly are being conveyed by those human figures.The floors are beautiful too.

One of the most interesting things I observed in the Duomo this time was the list of Archbishops who have held the Cathedral of Milan as their seat (that's what a cathedral is, the seat of a bishop). This list goes back to St. Anatalone, of Greece, in A.D. 51 and continues through the current Cardinal Angelo Scola, who took office in 2011. In between those on the list have included 39 saints, 17cardinals, and two popes (Pius XI who became pope in 1939 and Paul VI in 1978). It's quite an amazing continuum.

The cathedral is lit up at night, and the statue of the Virgin Mary known as "La Madonnina," designed and built in 1774 by sculptor Carlo Pellicani, is also specially lit up. By tradition, no building in Milan can be taller than the Madonnina, so when recent buildings have been taller than the Duomo Madonnina's 356 feet, the companies involved have generally placed smaller replicas of the Madonnina on top of their new buildings.