We started out our long Spring Break week by leaving as soon as the kids were out of school on Thursday afternoon. We made it half way to Milan which was the first city on our check list! We drove the last three hours to Milan on Friday morning in time for our Last Supper ticket time. Jared diligently called about getting tickets for Da Vinci’s Last Supper for several weeks until he finally got them to pick up and secured tickets for the day we’d be there. It was quite impressive!
The Last Supper is housed in the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie and is one of the ultimate masterpieces of the Renaissance. Da Vinci was hired by the Sforza family to decorate the dining hall of the Dominican monastery that adjoins the church. It was a bribe to the monks so that the Sforzas could locate their family tomb in the church. The French drove the Sforzas out of Milan and they were never buried here. The Dominicans got a great fresco for nothing!! Leonardo’s experimental fresco technique that he used for this painting was not great and the painting began to deteriorate 6 years after its completion. The church was bombed in WWII, but miraculously the wall in which it was painted on survived. The painting went under a 21 year restoration project that finished in 1999 and peeled away 500 years of touch-ups. Although it is faint, it is a very vibrant and beautiful painting. To lesson the damage done to the painting, only 900 visitors parade through a day. Each group consisting of 25 tourists at a time for exactly 15 minutes. You wait in several rooms to dehumidify yourself before entering the dining hall. So dang cool!!
Milan’s other famous site is its Duomo Cathedral. I’m sure quite impressive on a sunny day, but as it was it was raining a lot when we got to it. We did got inside but chose not to got to the top since it was so wet out. Apparently the top is what makes it so amazing with all of its Gothic spires.
Cole has chased pigeons in every famous square we have visited in Europe. He gets great joy from this:
Some guys came buy and put some feed on Jakes jacket so the pigeons would jump on. We try to avoid these euro seekers, but it was pretty cool this time so we ended up giving him a euro!
But by far our most interesting experience of the day was staying at this “Lovely” find. A higher level Youth hostel! Cheap it was and very interesting! When we pulled up we noticed that it had been given a 1 star rating. We chuckled until we went in and started seeing what 1 star meant! Its nice to look back on now and laugh, but for a sort of “germa-phobe”, I just wanted to hurry and fall asleep so we could get gone! They front desk clerk talked Jared into the breakfast……why he thought this would be a good idea we’ll never know. The clerk said, “It will be toast, croissants, jam, cereal, cheese slices, and juice. When we went down to eat, it was shelf life croissants sealed in bags, processed cheese in individual plastic wrap, one kind of cereal, some artificially sweetened juice and tiny square toasts used to dip in coffee. After our kids took two bites of croissants and nothing else, we now knew what a 1 star breakfast looked like. WE had to share a bathroom with the other room on our floor. Thankfully the other room guests (our bathroom buddies didn’t show up until after our kids were in bed!) We tried to keep them quiet in the morning when we were checking out, but a family of five kids I’m sure sounded like a herd of elephants coming through. We kept getting on the kids for being loud and I even let the dreaded “shut-up” words slip through my teeth (a real no-no in our family)! I was at my ropes end trying to keep our neighbors from coming out and giving us an earful about our obnoxiously loud kids, when Josh in the bathroom right by the other guest’s room was dancing around while brushing his teeth, slips on water from the shower, and falls head first onto the shower raised wall. Oh my. He could have lost an arm and his reaction would have been the same. Wailing and nashing of teeth. After that I was done. With Josh screaming and rubbing his head, we made like lightening clunking our suitcase duffle bags on every step down as we left out of that 1 star hotel. I’ve learned many lessons from this: 1. YOU definitely get what you pay for 2. Hostels aren’t really meant for families the size of seven 3. Four year olds have two volumes LOUD and even LOUDER when you want them to be quiet 4. We will not be staying in any 1 star hotels again. ever. ever. again.
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