I really must get some sleep!

I must be up early tomorrow for our full day on the Riviera of Levante, and our cooking class. These two-to-four hour bits of sleep are just not enough for this aging body!

Again, buona notte, amici.

All right, back to the things that REALLY matter.

That was just one of the entrees (yes, honestly, just one!) we ordered for dinner at Lupo's tonight, a mixed grill of seafood. It tasted even better than it looks. (More on Lupo's later.) With dinner we ordered a bottle of one of those fabulous Italian wines you seldom see in the US, dolcetto, a beautiful dry red from the neighboring Piemonte region.

And more on food:

Gelato! It really is a very different experience than ice cream. The texture is so light, the gelato gives no resistance in the mouth. Flavors are clean, and hit you just the right way.

The crucial question the gelateria poses to you at the ordering stand: cono or copetta?

You can choose as many flavors as you wish to load into your cone or cup. Besides the berry, mango, chocolate and coffee, there are flavors that could mystify. Want vanilla? Order "fior di latte," "flowers of milk. How poetic! Want mixed berries? Try "frutti di bosco," "fruit of the woods." Also try straciatella (vanilla with chocolate layers), cocco (coconut), nocciolo (hazelnut), prugna (plum), melone, ananas (pineapple) and mele (apple.

The City Between the Hills and Sea

As we approached Genoa, we caught glimpses of the Mediterranean sea. The Ligurian capital is perched in the center of a crescent-shaped bit of shoreline, and spreads upwards into the hills. It’s a gorgeous mix of buildings, from medieval to modern. (Not the best picture, I know - I'll try to get a better one tomorrow.)

See this turret-like tower right beside the apartment building?



The medieval feel to the city is still evident. The medieval quarter streets are unbelievably narrow! They're called caruggi (kah-ROO-jee).



Well, yes of course, being as unbelievably tall as I am, I suppose my arm span indicates the streets are not quite that narrow after all. But look at this now:


Here are a couple of other pictures of Genoa's streets. I am really loving this city. There's something about it, I swear, that feels like an Asian city before modernization. The narrow alleys, the streets lining those alleys...the carabinieri patrolling the caruggi and the Genoese citizens.....


....and ticketing them!! Oh by the way, I had my own brush with Italian police this morning. I was trying to call my tour mates in room 112. Was so groggy from lack of sleep that I dialed '0112' - unaware that in Italy, dialing '0' at a business will give you and outside line. And that is how I found out that the Italian equivalent of 9-1-1, is 1-1-2.

"Pronto. Carbinieri!"

Oooooooooooooooooooh!!


Cherri and Liz inside a university foyer. The entrance is an ancient stone portico.



More of that mix of medieval and contemporary. The arch leads into a steep driveway. Wouldn't you like to have an antiquarian marble saint protecting your window?

Maybe 3 dollars a gallon isn't so bad after all.

Out of Milan, and onto the Autostrada! The speed limit is 80 kilometers per hour, which is somewhere between 50 and 55 mph.

Gasoline is about 1.20 Euro per liter – that’s 1.53 US dollars per liter; at 3.79 liters to the gallon, that’s $5.79 per gallon!

We stopped at one of Italy's ubiquitous "Autogrill" - roughly equivalent to our truck stops. But you should see the food offered. The sandwiches? They all use incomparably fresh vegetables, immensely flavorful meats such as cotto and crudo (ham), bresaola, prosciutto di Parma, salami Genovese and various other salumi.

And the bread? Well, I now have a new goal to achieve in my baking!

Manon. Not Puccini's (sigh), but Massenet's version ain't half bad!

The performance in La Scala was really excellent. It wasn't easy for me to see the stage from the balcony, what with people ahead of me craning their necks right in my line of sight; but frankly, there wasn't a lot of action taking place onstage. So with each scene opening, I'd stand up and use my binocs to get the lay of the land, so to speak, then relax and concentrate on the music.

IT WAS GORGEOUS. Ion Marin (very handsome dude) conducted the orchestra, which balanced perfectly against the vocalists - who were brilliant. Massenet's music and orchestration is lush, melodic and dramatic.

The plot of Manon (the same Manon of Puccini's "Manon Lescaut") involves a self-centred, lying, deceptive little tart/twit whose motto is, as Sueann Ramella would put it, "ME! ME! ME!! IT'S ALL ABOUT ME!!!!!!"

How to sum it up? Act 1 is something like this:

Manon: I am so beautiful!!
Des Grieux: I think you are beautiful!
Manon: I am so beautiful!!
Des Grieux: You are not the sort of girl I should consort with, but...
Manon: I am so beautiful!!
Des Grieux: I think I am falling in love with you.
Manon: Hey! Are you listening to me? I am, like, so beautiful!!
Des Grieux: Oh damn you, I am going to get me to a monastery and take holy orders.
Manon: I am so beautiful!! Oh yes, I am too too beautiful!!

Well, just as he tries to become a priest, La Tart shows up with a change of heart.

Manon: I am so sorry, please don't wear those robes, they look so dowdy, and they won't look good when you walk beside me, because....remember....I AM SO BEAUTIFUL!!!
Des Grieux: Damn you woman, leave me alone!
Manon: no, really, you should accept my offer, because...I am still the same woman you fell in love with, and even though four years have passed and I am now an old hag at age 20...I AM STILL SO BEAUTIFUL!!!
Des Grieux: Damn you, woman, get thee behind.....oh what the hell, I give up. Let's go. I cannot resist you anymore, because...in the end....YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL!!

You just know it's going to end badly.

OK, so that's not exactly how it goes, but it's not a complete fabrication either! REALLY.

Tsk. Such a bad message for young girls.

All right, it's now almost 4AM (Milan time) and I am bleary-eyed after being up for nearly 22 hours. I've just recorded some audio updates for NWPR and posted them back to the studio, so barring any problems, they should be airing Monday onwards.

Yawn. We're off to Genoa tomorrow morning, I'd better get a bit of shuteye, then. Buona notte, amici!

Up on the Roof.

Sunday morning I went with two members of the group up to the Duomo rooftop to get up close and personal with the saints. I especially like those who sinned incomparably before turning it all around, thereby earning the right to be on the Duomo.

I took the paid elevator up, but you still have to walk the last bit up to the top. Here are a couple of shots from that excursion.



Cherri and Liz by one of the arches. You can see from the carved marble above them why the Duomo looks so lacy from the street.



Wish I knew enough about mythology and/or saints to know this guy's story....if you know why he's being held up (or pulled apart) by the cherubs, please post a comment to let me know!


You can walk across those massive roof tiles and get right up to the stained glass windows. Mass was in session when this shot was taken. I could hear the choir very clearly and smell incense too!



Now, THAT's a downspout, eh? Just one of the many gargoyles on the Duomo. One of them closely resembles a duck-billed platypus. No wonder Mark Twain said the statues including "every creeping thing!' (how King James....)


Imagine living with a Gothic cathedral right up against your home! See how close the saints and spires are to this block of apartments (possibly offices?), with rooftop gardens?

This is one of the uncovered sides of the Duomo, taken on this cloudy, humid Saturday afternoon. What you can't see in this picture is the incredible swell of humanity just below, in the Piazza del Duomo. It must be campaign season. There were many tents of political parties and candidates and volunteers handing out flyers.



This tent was of a party or candidate advocating an anti-immigration stand.

L'ultima Cena

Da Vinci's much-loved work "The Last Supper" is housed in Santa Maria delle Grazie. From its title, the Milanese concocted the word "Cenacolo" (chay-NAH-koh-loh) to name the building housing this incredible fresco.



No matter how trite you may think the image is, what with it hanging in millions of Catholic homes and the subject of countless parodies, the experience of actually standing before the fresco is captivating. I found myself unable to look away for even a second of the allotted fifteen minutes allowed each group of visitors. There is so much animation and expression that I never saw in prints of the image. And of course, what we were seeing was the fresco after an amazing restoration project that took over twenty years to complete, from 1978 to 1999. (And yes, the figure of John is so feminine, it's hard to buy the argument that it's the depiction of an 18-year old boy. At least, not any 18-year old boy I've seen on the WSU campus, ever!)

ADDED ON 5/21: The above picture is a stock photo of the fresco. Pictures are not allowed at the Cenacolo!!

Here are two good background articles on Il Cenacolo.

The first is from hellomilano.com. The other is from Wikipedia.

By the way, all over town there are posters advertising "The Da Vinci Code." From what I gather, there's a Leonardo exhibit taking place at the Castello Sforzesco. I'm guessing it was timed to coincide with the release of the film.

A pilgrimage fulfilled.

Note to Robin Rilette: I saw him first!!!!!

Oh my stars. I almost passed out. La Scala's been my dream visit since I was a teenage opera geek. Here I am, in the La Scala Museum with the bust of my beloved Puccini. There was also an opportunity for me to go into one of the legendary boxes to have a peek, but no pictures were allowed. The red velvet lining those boxes is so lush. Tomorrow night I'll be watching Massenet's "Manon", but not from the boxes, sadly. As expensive as tickets are here, they cover only ten percent of the costs. The Italian government finances the rest.

Even the stairway going up to the theater was an experience, with posters right out of opera history.



And below is a picture of our listeners Sylvia, Barbara, Beverly and John with the bust of another La Scala legend, Maestro Arturo Toscanini. He controlled every aspect of the theater's operation, including the choice of coffee beans used in the intermission beverage!

This palazzo flanking the Piazza del Duomo houses Milan's tourism authority. I found its expression of optimism, in English no less, quite charming.

By the way, I am just loving our little group of NWPR listeners on this tour. There are three sisters and the husband of one of them, another couple, a mother and daughter, and a pair of friends.

I know this isn't a great picture, but I wanted to show you my new friends right away (I promise better pictures and some details on the individuals later on). We're standing in the Piazza del Duomo, in front of the Cathedral, with the statue of Vittorio Emmanuele in the background:

Finally, the Duomo!

Our delightful Milanese tour guide Arianna took us on a a ride on the subway and taught us about the city’s public transport system, as we will be on our own this afternoon and tomorrow. We then headed to the Piazza del Duomo to begin our city tour. We were disappointed that the façade of the world’s fourth largest (and possibly most ornate) cathedral was covered up for cleaning:



But there was an upside. We arrived while the Archbishop of Milan was saying Mass, with the choir and pipe organ in attendance. The interior of the Duomo is dark but even more ornate than the outside; with the choir’s voices resonating in that cavernous marble space it was spine-chilling. (Interior pictures not allowed, sorry.)

(BTW - I'll have some pics of Duomo details coming in a later post.)

Suffice it to say, Milan has been multicultural from the get go, having been ruled by the French, the Spanish and the Austrians, in the form of one powerful Duke or Prince after another. Finally, Milan was united with the rest of Italy under the reign of Vittorio Emannuele, who commissioned the building of a shopping mall—and what a mall it is!



I think it was Michael Palin who called Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele the Mother of All Shopping Malls.

The Galleria was a real favorite of Ernest Hemingway. Its arcades are domed and vaulted, its various arcades are elaborately tiled. You can't help but gasp at the enormous arched roof of iron and glass. (Tragic backstory: Just one day before the Galleria was inaugurated, the architect who designed the structure slipped from the scaffolding as he was inspecting the dome. He fell to his death.)

The upper levels have very detailed balconies, and what seem to be murals are actually mosaics. We were told the Milanese humidity (I can vouch that it certainly is humid!) would damage paintings, so the pieces were replaced with mosaic.



You know what's awfully incongruous in the Galleria? Right across from the Louis Vuitton and Prada boutiques, just to the right of this picture above, is – McDonalds! (I couldn't bring myself to photograph that, so use your mind's eye here, if you can stomach it.)

More pictures of the Galleria can be found at this site.

We’re in the Hotel Cristoforo Colombo on Corso Buenos Aires, the LONGEST shopping street in Milan. After checking in, I walked around looking for a Bancomat (ATM) to get some Euros. I walked past boutique after boutique sporting the most gorgeous clothes, and bar after bar. One big difference between American bars and their Italian counterparts is their bill of fare. These bars here offer a lot of food choices, from Panini and piedini to complete four-course meals, as well as gelati and even frozen yogurt.

I just had a simple but fabulous dinner, which I ordered in Italian! I told the waitress I wanted something with frutti di mare – literally, “fruits of the sea” (seafood). She suggested a pizza. It came with mussels and clams in the shell, along with shrimp and the most tender octopus, but also alarmingly, with bits of imitation crab. One feature I noticed is that the toppings were not distributed somewhat equally across the whole pie, as they are back home; instead, they were spread out in little groups. To go with my dinner I ordered a half liter of “l’acqua naturale” (still water, with a pH of 7.8, which should please my naturopath-observant friends.) The house red wine is 2 Euro for a quarter liter - less than a can of soda, which costs 3! O what a dilemma. My thrifty soul forces me to pick the rosso.

I ended the meal with caffe corretto – literally, “corrected coffee.” And man, how they correct it! With grappa. Mmmmm.

The next half hour was spent people watching. My favorite sight this evening: the fashionably dressed young women navigating the busy intersections on their Bianchi bicycles, while chatting on cell phones!!

We have to be up early tomorrow to see the Duomo and Da Vinci's "The Last Supper." It's almost midnight now, so time to say "buona notte."

Italy, at last! We touched down at Milan’s Malpensa Airport, and I made contact with my entire tour group, a wonderful bunch of 9 women and two men. Our Italian tour guide Arianna, escorted us out of the airport – and all of us were surprised that we didn’t have to go through Italian customs. Arianna explained that since our flight came from Denmark, we were already within the EU and thus didn’t need to go through that step.

On the half-hour drive into downtown Milan, I spoke to Arianna about getting the group signed up for a cooking class in Genoa, and with a couple of calls on her cell phone, she set it up! So our day on the Riviera of Liguria will close with a cooking class in Rapollo with a “particular type of man” (I take it to mean a character) named Fausto, who is also a avid cartoonist. He will teach us to cook, then feed us in his restaurant complete with wine, aperitivi and after-dinner drinks, present us with aprons and cookbooks bearing his art. We’re all pretty excited about that!

Copenhagen’s Kastrup Airport boasts an incredible shopping and dining area, with designer boutiques offering all sorts of shoes and bags, clothing, cosmetics and perfume, liquor and tobacco, and dining that appears to offer more upscale choices than most airport food courts. There’s a tapas bar, and English steak house and a seafood bar offering raw oysters and lobster. Prices are posted in Danish Kronor, which a sales clerk tells me is about 7 Kronor to the Euro.

One thing I notice all over the terminal is this sign:



I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it meant, so I asked a Danish airport worker.

It means emergency exit!

It was hot and muggy when I left Pullman, and the flight was the same. The discomfort was alleviated only by the aerial view of the beautiful green and brown rolling hills of the Palouse, and of Mount Rainier, still clad in snow despite this recent heat wave. In Seattle, I boarded the airport train to get to the S concourse for the SAS flight to Copenhagen. There, I met up with four members of the NWPR tour, but we didn’t have much time to chat before boarding. I was cramped in the middle of the middle row, and the Scandinavian man next to me has fallen asleep after consuming staggering quanitites of alcohol. His elbow is digging into my side. I’ve tried prodding him gently. but it took a pretty sharp nudge to wake him to allow me to make my way to the bathroom.

Now, nearly four hours into the flight, I’ve gone through nearly a third of the Da Vinci Code and felt the need to blog. There’s wireless internet on board (SAS says as of March 2005, it was the world’s first airline to offer wireless on board its entire intercontinental fleet.) but alas, one has to pay a minimum of ten bucks to go online, so I’m recording this as a text document, and I’ll post it online once I get a wireless connection on terra firma.

It’s been over ten years since I’ve been on an intercontinental flight. One feature I found entertaining on this flight is the individual video screen in the seatbacks. The safety demo was easy to see, and one can choose from a menu of different movies. But what I found most entertaining (before the novelty wore off an hour later) were the two live cams mounted on the fuselage itself – one at the front of the plane, and one below. It helped to relieve a little of the claustrophobic seating situation, and gives some measure of democratic viewing to those not privileged to have window seats.

The moving map and flight data are great. I like knowing that I’m somewhere over northern Canada, east of the Gulf of Boothia and moving in an arc south of Baffin Island. The ground speed is 566 mph at 33 thousand feet, and that the outside temperature is an unbelievable minus 68 Fahrenheit!!

(Note: I wrote the blog above on board the SAS flight, but am posting it now from my hotel in Milan.)

Sciopero!! (Strike!!)

Well, well, well. I could quite likely get a taste of a long-standing Italian tradition after all. But this is not a case of striking postal workers or garbage collectors or bus drivers. Oh no. Milan's MODELS and other fashion professionals staged a three-hour strike today over the issue of foreign competition - specifically, American companies which set up shop in Milan just before big runway events, siphon off the work, then close shop and then vanish. They're also unhappy with the shadowy agencies which lure girls into what they think is a modeling job, except it turns out to be quite something else.

No pickets signs and sandwich boards in this protest. Agenzia Giornalistica Italia reports the models will cross their legs for three hours.

I'm tickled by that image, but I'm not sure why. The models have arranged for further work stoppages if they don't get satisfaction. Since I arrive Friday night, they could well be in the second day of leg-crossing protest.

How do you say "charley horse" in Italian?

As I was packing my bags this afternoon, making sure the ice pick and machete were removed from the hidden compartments, the subject of airport security came to mind. Wouldn't it be a gas to see this posted all over the terminal?

"DO NOT LEAVE EMOTIONAL BAGGAGE UNATTENDED."

TSA could approach the American Psychological Association about sponsoring those signs.

I'm using a laptop from work for the first time this evening, trying to familiarize myself with its workings before taking off tomorrow. It's so light, the power supply and adapter together with the microphone and other accessories weigh almost twice as much as the whole laptop!

I'm trying to pack lightly, while keeping in mind that in Italy it's practically mandatory to dress smartly at all times, even in the most casual settings. As added incentive to keep it to the minimum, I remind myself that Venice doesn't really have streets, so it's quite likely I'll have to haul my own suitcase off the boat and over cobbled streets to the hotel.

My three-leg flight departs Thursday afternoon from Pullman for Seattle, then to Copenhagen, and finally for Milan. With the nine hour time difference, I should be at Malpensa on Friday night.

On May 18th, I leave for 10 days in Northern Italy - Milan, Genoa, the Italian Riviera, Verona and Venice. Along the way I'll be forced to see some of the world's greatest art and architecture, take in opera performances in La Scala, Genoa's Teatro Carlo Felice and the Opera Ballet in Venice. I've only waited all my life to hear a real live opera in La Scala! Too bad it won't be Puccini or Verdi, but La Scala is La Scala.

I fell deeply in love with Italy on a visit in 1971, when I was only eight. That trip left deep impressions and vivid memories. I vowed to go back some day, and now the time has come.

This time I'll actually spend time in Milan instead of whizzing through on the way to Switzerland, and experience the Milanese Aperitivo - that's Fashion City's hip and trendy version of Happy Hour. And since we're going to see "The Last Supper" here, I'll read the Da Vinci Code on the 10-hour flight to Copenhagen and see what the fuss is all about.

I can't wait to discover Genoa. What is it about this city by the sea, that spawned Christopher Columbus, as well as focaccia and basil pesto? Whatever it was, I want to experience it! Not just the medieval soul of Genoa, but also the modern cosmopolitan face, the one it shows in the renowned Aquarium.

And Venice, this time as an adult, free to sip a Tintoretto at Harry's Bar, or take a cream tea at the Caffe Florian....I have no words. My most fervent hope right now is for my arthritic knee to hold out to the end of the trip. If it gives out and I fall off a Ponte into the Canal, I promise to write about it right here.

As we say in radio, "stay tuned...."