Italy Week: Cremona & Milan

On Tuesday 9/16, after about 4 hours of sleep, we hopped on a train from Venice to Cremona. Cremona is super cute little town, but the only thing for a tourist to see there is the Stradivari Museum, and it was spectacular! What a treat for my violinist husband! Sorry, no cameras allowed inside, but I did get a shot of the outside! After the museum we walked around town and ate lunch before our train for Milan.

 

Next on the agenda was to go see Da Vinci’s The Last Supper in Milan! We have both been familiar with this painting since we were kids, so we were stoked to get to see it in person. We arrived at Milano Centrale (Milan’s HUGE train station), got in a taxi, showed him the name of the destination on our tour confirmation paper, and he took off. 20-something minutes later (by the way, it was the start of Fashion Week, so you can only imagine the traffic) we arrived at a place with a different name on the sign. Reid questioned the driver several times about it, but the guy INSISTED we were at the right place. So we got all of our luggage (2 60-something-pound suitcases and our backpacks) and took off to find the tour, which was starting in 10 minutes. Much to our dismay, there were about 50 steps between us and the door, so up we went… suitcases and all. Reid walked up to the ticket counter, showed the lady the confirmation and guess what…. NOT the right place!!! For some reason I will never understand, no one could tell us where we needed to go! To make this little experience even more fun, it was when we were dragging the suitcases back down the stairs that I realized one of the wheels had broken off my suitcase. Fabulous.

We decided to just head for the hotel, but could not get connected to Wi-Fi and ended up asking about 15 different Italians for directions, all of which told us something COMPLETELY different…. 3 hours later we found it. Yes, we dragged those suitcases (minus a wheel) all over Milan’s cobblestone streets for 3 hours. At one point we decided enough was enough, let’s go get a late lunch and try to connect to Wi-Fi, but EVERYTHING closes from 4:00 to 7:00! Never would I have thought that so many things could go wrong in one day.

We had plans to meet our Italian photographer friend Fabrizio for dinner that night, (of course we were really late) so when we FINALLY found our hotel, we showered and headed out for an amazing night of food and exploring the city! He knew how much I was looking forward to seeing the Duomo, so after dinner he took us to see it all lit up!

As you can probably guess, we were WIPED OUT from that crazy day, so we took it easy on Wednesday. I can’t decide if the Duomo is more beautiful at night or in the daytime! We hadn’t originally planned to go inside so I wore shorts that day, but when we went back there was no line at all, so Reid went in and took lots of pictures for me 🙂 (No shorts allowed in churches)

 

You just thought our experience in Milan was crazy, you won’t believe what happened when we got to Pisa!! We just thought things couldn’t get worse! Come back tomorrow to learn more about our CRAZY Italian adventures! And to see some beautiful photos of a pretty famous crooked tower 🙂 Ciao!