Pinot, Bretzels, and Cathedrals

Good Morning my friends!

So here I am, fresh off the road travelled, and the printing press to ensure my thoughts are not forgotten…it’s just after 6am, and after a long day on the road yesterday, I fell asleep early last night, only to wake up before the Strasbourg pigeons this morning.

A trip to Italy has been on my wish list since we arrived in Europe, and for a while it was bandied about to be ‘done’ this summer.  Initially we planned on a 18 day journey, but as you know life gets in the way, and after an additional trip to SA, leave and finances got dissolved, and I was more than happy with a 7 day road trip to Tuscany, through the Swiss and Italian Alps.

I booked us a gîte (the French term for ‘self-catering accommodation’) somewhere in the Tuscan hillside, halfway between Pisa and Lucca.  We had plans to take our bikes with us, so that we could cycle around towns a little easier, but after we Google-mapped the village we were staying in, and noticed the 10 hair-pin bends on the route, we realised we were really deep in the Italian hillside, and bikes for us girls would be a waste of energy.  It was a good call, because cycle paths in Tuscany don’t exist, and I would have coped for 15 minutes before collapsing in a miserable pile with my Beth-meister after fighting with demon Italian drivers!

Armed with light summer clothes, mosquito repellent; kindles and kids books; a couple of computer print-outs of what to see in Milan; Firenze (Florence, for the un-initiated); Lucca; Pisa and Sienna, and an art-ful map of Cappanori (the section of Tuscany we were in), we set off last Sunday for a long drive through the lake areas of Switzerland and upper Italy to spend a night near enough to Milan.  The trip started badly, after the girls were playing in the car and were the cause of a flat car battery… Sadly we haven’t really acquainted ourselves well enough with our neighbours, and couldn’t ask anybody close by for assistance in jump-starting our car.  120€ later we were armed with jumper-leads and a small car battery- we were not a very happy car full of people as we set off later than planned.

Last Sunday was blissfully cool for a change, but the low hanging clouds did hide the very magnificent Swiss Alps. As we headed up into the Gotthard Pass, I was suitably impressed by the water cascading down the mountain side and into the river that flowed over smooth grey rocks-don’t know what the Swiss do in their country to make every single image picture perfect ;-)!  We had been warned to try avoid taking the Gotthard Tunnel, as traffic slows up on this route, and for a few kilometres, we drove through a little town, but eventually our GPS spat us back out onto the highway and we had to sit for 30 minutes in traffic.  The Gotthard Tunnel is 17km’s long, and the other option is over the Gotthard Pass, which after a peruse on Google, looks terrifyingly beautiful.  Next time we will make sure our Garmin takes us on that route…

Coming down the other side, it’s not very far to get into a city called Lugano, and following Lugano is the entire Italian Como region- you know Como- think of Oceans Eleven (or 12) and George Clooney and you’ll know where I’m talking about.  Here, the Alps fall down into the Lakes- can you picture towering, jagged mountains surrounding the very blue waters of the Italian lakes?  Oh, to be able to live high up in those towns for a week and try to capture those images forever!  Sadly we were pressed for time, so we drove through as slowly as traffic would allow us, and sadly taking photos with my iPhone from the inside of the car just didn’t do any justice at all.

We arrived outside Milan in time to check into a Holiday Inn Express hotel, and were directed to a ristorante around the corner for some very delicious pizza (what else?).  The ristorante itself was down the road, over some very dodgy potholes in the gravel road, lying among strange looking street dogs and tatty forgotten weeds- I found it quite difficult to not be so judging- I was quite weary of taking our girls into a dodgy looking area for a meal.  But it turned out that the restaurant in question was not a dive, that it was a little piece of heaven.  It was full of travellers, as there appeared to be other hotels in the area.  But it begs the question- what are your comfort zones with kids in tow, and how far do you stretch out of that zone for a genuine experience?

The next morning we programmed the GPS to take us to a parking area between the Milan airport (waaay far away from the city itself) and the city centre.  From there we popped onto a train to be able to go into Milan city to see the sights, stroll around and have an ice-cream.  I have to confess, my knowledge of Italian history is pretty much non-existent, so all we really did was walk around and view a few very old, but very beautiful cathedrals, and pieces of very inspiring architecture… After Milan, Pisa and Lucca, I had vague memories of Standard 7 Art and  Standard 6 History coming back to me, although somewhat mixed up and very blurry.

While we were walking through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan (it is the pre-cursor to any modern day Mall), we stepped out and I noticed an advert for a Leonardo da Vinci museum exhibition.  The guy who was selling it explained that the exhibitors had taken da Vinci’s sketchings and recreated them as real life pieces, and they created interactive displays for each work.  As well as 3-D pieces, they also housed digitally enhanced reprints od Leonardo’s famous art works, namely The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa.  Having done some research on The Last Supper, I realised on the day we left that the chance to see this work of art in real life was going to be impossible.  In high season, we would have had to book 4 months ahead of time, we would still have had to queue to get in to the Monastery, and then we would have had 15 minutes to view the real life original piece.  Obviously I hadn’t prebooked tickets, so the opportunity to see a digitally re-mastered piece was a suitable option, as well as the chance to see a exhibition that was supposedly suitable for kiddies.

Oh, if only Beth had been just a teeny bit older to be able to appreciate it.  Poor Anton had to rush from display to display trying to prevent her from destroying anything, while Alex was really interested in the interactive displays to an extent that we fought over them to be able to read anything!  However, I have to say, the exhibition was really good: aside from 3D displays of Leonardo’s visions, they re-printed original folios of his work, and the recreated Last Supper was beautiful.  (I really do wish I remembered a little more of my Std 7 Art class.  And I do wish I had had Mom with me.  That would have been very special.)

By now I think I might have bored you to death, so for today I am going to leave us hanging in Milan.  I will write more tomorrow about the rest of the trip.  In the mean time, here are a few more images from Milan- we weren’t allowed to take photos inside the exhibition 😦