László Varga

I have passed for several times through Milano since I was here in Italy and never had the chance to actually visit the city. After the Torino visit, we thought of making a trip to Milano also, right on the next day. This time, we have not booked in advance, we went with possible ad-hoc plans to visit the city.

As usual we have arrived in Milano Centrale which was already very familiar to me. Nothing much has changed. The central station was almost completely renovated and everything was looking nice. From there we went to take the subway to go directly to the Piazza del Duomo (taking the yellow, number 3 subway).

As we exited the subway, we have found ourselves in front of the very imposing Doumo di Milano. The structure itself has an amazing Gothic architecture, with an almost painfully white surface. The square in front of the dome (Piazza del Duomo) is full of tourists, pigeons and a number of annoying people telling you to take this, take that because it brings you luck… well, don’t.
After taking a reasonable amount of photos on the square, we decided to go inside. The entry fee into the dome itself was absent. Tourists can go in and out without paying anything. There is only a control at the gates checking your luggage. The interior of the dome is amazing, full of paintings, pillars and beautiful sculptures.
Visitors can also go up to the top of the Duomo. The entry fees are: 5 euros for using the stairs, 9 euros with the elevator. The entry point is on the left side of the Duomo (I am telling this, because we actually did a whole circle around the building – which is huge – before finding it).

The Galleria Emanuele II is right next to the Doumo. It is a classy collection of expensive shops and restaurants. The cheapest is McDonalds (which for the sake of integrity, has beautifully painted golden signs instead of the plastic yellow ones). Again, we had to eat there… On the other side of the Galleria, is the Milano Scala (opera house). Unfortunately we could not go in 🙁 .

After the Galleria we went to Castello Sforzesco, an interesting fort in the middle of the city, and from there we strolled on the passages of the very nice park next to the Castle.

Milano is a very classy and culturally rich city of Italy. Before the visit I did not pay much attention to it, but now I can say it is too a MUST if you are in Italy. For us it was an effortless trip, because most of the landmarks can be reached on foot. Also the plan of going without guided tours went well, we have seen a lot and remembered a lot 🙂 .

I have posted images of the trip on my Picasa account.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 9:33 pm and is filed under Italy, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.