Meeting Rossini and half the TMNG

The continuing observations of the Borths brothers in Milan (here are some photos of the events described herein)...

Teatro alla Scala: On the other side of the Galleria is the most famous opera house in the world. To the opera world it’s the Louvre, it’s Wrigley Field, it’s the Shoe, it’s a place that embodies everything it was built for. To perform at La Scala is to be at the top of the operatic heap. Revamped in 2004, it’s a jewelry box of gilt and red velvet. Josh and I were interested in seeing a performance if we could catch one, but first we wanted to see the opera’s museum. The place has been around since 1776 and has seen as much history as, well, our country, so we assumed the museum would have some spectacular artifacts all tastefully arranged in engaging displays. It didn’t.

The museum was essentially someone’s collection of opera odds and ends. This person died and their heirs wanted to empty the attic, so they gave it to La Scala. I don’t know if that’s true, but it felt like a likely story as we glanced into cases with fans of famous Divas and busts of composers famous and obscure. The walls were covered with uninspiring portraits of people we were notable two-hundred years ago, but now stare blankly. There was a limited attempt to explain these personalities except the ones we knew about such as Verdi (they had a special devotion to him in Milan). The most interesting section of the museum was the costume display where you could observe the fastidious detail the costume designer invests in every garment. Also in the display was a series of costumes designed by Picasso for a ballet.

The reason you go to the museum is because you can peak into the theater. This was a wasted opportunity, though, since Josh and I had plans to see a performance.

How to get one of the standing-room seats at La Scala:

1) Show up early. The list appears at 1 PM. There’s only 120 of the things. We showed up way early, as in 11 AM, we were second in line and wouldn’t have companionship for an hour.
2) Make friends with the old man who’s been going to La Scala for several decades. Be sure to look amused as he speaks at you in perky Italian. You won’t understand. You probably woudn’t understand if you spoke Italian.
3) Admire the old man's ancient dog who would rather be sleeping than doing really anything else. This sidewalk is an extension of his yard.
4) Be fawned over by the old man’s friends who are entertained by these punctual Americans who seem to care about La Scala.
5) Become part of this opera family.
6) Put your name on the list for tickets at 1 PM.
7) Go back to the hotel to grab your stuff and start the labor intensive process of going down the street hotel by hotel searching for a decent price. Let on you will be back at each place and try not to act as cheap as you are.
8) Look for fashion design district and be mildly disappointed that fashion is so muted and repetitive.
9) Return to La Scala at 4:45 where the Opera Family makes sure you are in the correct part of the line to claim a ticket voucher. Receive a packet of ancient playbills from the regular while his dog snores.
10) Return to ticket office at 6 to actually claim a physical ticket.
11) Pay too much for a pizza and beer dinner at a café near the Duomo where you are besieged by pigeons. Literally. The café you are at serves chips with your beverage and the pigeons have learned to go for the snacks with a vengeance. You are but an obstacle between their appetite and your chips. If your name is Joshua, brush off the whitewash that suddenly appears on your arm thanks to the pigeons. If you name is Matthew, unsympathetically laugh. Pay the bill.
12) Back to the Opera at 7:15 for the performance.
13) Realize you may have wasted an afternoon in Milan, but also realize you’re not sure what you would have done with it if you weren’t waiting for tickets.
14) Enjoy the show.

We weren't allowed to take photos. We might have tried to sneak one, but it probably would have caused our adoptive opera-parents to raise their eyebrows in disapproval. So, this is what the interior looks like to those with a photo pass.

And we did. We were assigned seats, but couldn’t see much - so you and every other person in the back row – stand up, holding onto overhead bars so you can see and hear what’s going on. This makes reading the subtitles on the back of your seat tough to read, but this is the sacrifice we make to live cheaply while enjoying high art.

Josh looking suave outside La Scalla. He's contrapposto and the building Neo-Classical. Further proof everyone wants to be Greek.

The performance was Rossini’s “Il viagio a Rheims.” According to Josh, this was a show put together with all the aria’s Rossini hadn’t gotten into more plot driven pieces. The story involved a bunch of aristocrats from different nations trying to see the French King’s coronation in Rheims. They never make it. But they sing a lot. One scene features the harried porter packing everyone’s stuff while making gross national stereotypes about Germany, Russia, England, France, Italy, and Poland. It’s amazing how many of the stereotypes persist. They then sing about a beautiful united Europe under the kings. Obviously Rossini was writing before 1910.

Entering a castle exactly the way you would want to enter a castle.

Castello Sforzesco: A bit of a hike from the center of town (also called the Duomo) is the Castello Sforzesco, a massive bastion erected in the 14th century, that now guards a couple city museums.

Castello Sforzesco from the inside.

There’s one on Egypt, another on life in a castle, but only one was deemed worthy of our limited time: Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco. Or more simply, the art museum. It helped it was free. After walking past sturdy towers and a massive courtyard blanketed with lounging students, we began our tour through Milanese art history. We started in the Dark Ages with Cletic inspired carving brought in by the Lombards, the invading Germanic tribe that stomped out Roman culture and asthetics. It would be an uphill battle before ideas like “proportions” and “perspective” gained much traction.

I know it's tough to carve stone, but is it really that hard to made the head smaller than a pumpkin? Come on Medieval Artist, it's time to step it up a notch.

Josh and I were studying some massive tapestries when a guard approached us “Scuzi, uh we close soon. In 15 minutes. If you have not visited it, you should see the things later in the museum. These are more important. See Michelangelo.” We appreciated the advice. While there was plenty of artistic merit in the triptychs we power-walked past, we really did want to spend some time with Mike.

The final object in the museum is reportedly Michelangelo’s last sculpture (he had a lot of stuff in progress at the time of his death, so figuring out which piece was his “last” is kinda tough): The Rodanini Pieta. The marble sculpture is unfinished with abstract lines suggesting the faces of the dead Christ and Mary. Features such as Christ’s legs are polished, but the arms are amorphous. You can see the chisel marks in the stone. In a few days we would be in Florence where we would see some of Michelangelo’s completed works (though he didn’t complete all that much) and seeing this scene, just emerging from the rock, was an important reminder of how much effort it took to coax art from marble.

The Last Supper: In an unassuming monastery away from the city center sits one of the most famous images in western art. The artist labored for years, going past deadline and over budget. But in Milan in the late 15th century, you didn’t mess with Da Vinci. He invested his fresco with the full force of his towering, Renaissance intellect. The only problem is he really didn’t think about making sure it would last. He tried a new technique for painting plaster and the result was a work that quickly started to deteriorate and crumble.

Leonardo contemplating where to find a cheap beverage in Milan. He would soon be stumped and move on to thoughts concerning military technology.

Since its completion, people have been touching it up and restoring it until you weren’t sure what was Da Vinci and what was people trying to be DaVinci. A few years ago the work was completely restored with an effort to preserve only Leonardo’s original vision. The work once sat opposite monks at dinner, and later presided over Napoleon’s horses. Now it’s in a thermally and chemically sealed room. Only a limited number of people are allowed in for 15 minutes to look at the work under the supervision of a guard.

The thing has been hyped and analyzed (thank you Dan Brown) within an inch of its crumbling life. There was all kinds of disappointment potential. But it didn’t disappoint. The image is massive. The apostles and Christ are life-sized and larger. Everyone is a little faded, like someone forgot to put on the autofocus, but the gestures are preserved and parts of the vivid expressions. It’s packed with narrative elements I’ve never paid attention to as the apostles lean into each other with questions and theories. After being immersed in such a work I feel proud to have been Leonardo when we played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

We also did a lot of wandering through city parks, venturing down narrow alleys that dead ended into parking lots, then sat down to pay too much for drinks. After two days in Milan we were ready to leave. She had shown us what we wanted to see. We were brusquely told off by waiters and ate more gelato. It was time to see if Venice was all it’s cracked up to be…

If this was in the States you would assume it's on the quad of some state university. In this case though, it's in a city park by a castle that was built in the 1300s.

The photos of Verona and Milan before we move on down the boot.

Milan Part Uno: Pretty Buildings

Milan is one of the northernmost cities in Italy and has a reputation for not really being Italian. Personally, I thought this made it a great segue into Italian culture as we graded from the stodgier Swiss-and-German influenced north to the vespa-and-mob dominated south. The problem with our strategy was Milan is a tough city to really enjoy. It has a few remarkable sights, but it’s difficult to really revel in great art and architecture when the bars close at eleven and the drinks cost seven euro. So, I will spare you the frustrations of wandering the “fashion district” that was remarkably difficult to find and skip to the good stuff (the buildings for now):

The Milan Duomo. In 1386 the archbishop of Milan saw the gap in the middle of the city, left by the old Roman basilica (Roman courthouse) and later cathedral which had recently burned to the ground. He decided to fill the gap with a hip new structure in the French Gothic style. Nearly six-hundred years later (in 1965 they declared it complete) it stands as the symbol of Italy, and is one of the most memorable huge churches I’ve seen recently, and you can scroll through these posts to appreciate how many huge churches I’ve notched on my belt. The building is wide, the architect missing the memo on a narrow nave fronted by two massive bell towers, with small-ish windows pocking the façade. The girth of the place allows it to gleam. The white and pink marble was cleaned and the scaffolding only removed a few months ago, marking the Milan Duomo as one of the only non-scaffolded churches I’ve seen in my wanderings.
The interior is cavernous. Because it’s so wide, the light from the narrow stained glass windows barely make it to the edge of the pews, let alone the center aisle. Not a great spot to get hitched.

Here the interior looks a little brighter than it was thanks to a stead pew and an extended shutter speed. But it still feel like spelunking.

A few windows stood out including one from the ‘20s showing the expulsion of Lucifer, and the gargantuan windows behind the altar. Each of three was divided into small blocks, a comic strip of the Old Testament, a comic strip of the New Testament, and a final group showing holy people. Because it was divided into so many complicated scenes, the windows lost a little of their grandeur. They were actually more impressive from the outside where the swirling marble frames created a massive, cohesive whole.

Windows that are kind of hard to appreciate as the distance increases, but the scale stays constant. This window depicts holy people doing holy things.

The exterior of the stained-glass windows was almost more interesting than the colored panes.

The final standouts of the interior were an intricate 12th century candelabrum packed with biblical imagery, and a grotesque statue of St. Bartholomew carved by Marco d' Lopez, one of Da Vinci’s students. The apostle was skinned alive then crucified in Armenia for being an outspoken Christian missionary. He is now tastefully the patron saint of tanners. I’m sure he would love to hang out in a leather workshop if he could meet and mingle today.

A massive 12th century masterpiece. The base is about five feet wide, and a couple dozen candles would have stood about 15 feet off the ground. Dragons support the base with demons yanking on their teeth and ears. In the filigree are scenes from Genesis and allegorical stuff about the Earth.

The statue shows Bartholomew before his martyrdom is complete. He holds the Gospel of Matthew and placidly gazes into the cathedral with his skin casually thrown around his shoulders. D’ Lopez had clearly taken up the illegal practice of human dissection, because the statue has all the right muscles in all the right places. Wow art can be disturbing.

St. Bart modeling 50 AD's favorite fashion accessory at the first Milan Fashion Show.

As I said, the interior is not why you go to the Duomo. You go to climb to the roof. Hundreds of spires and flying buttresses soar over the building, each crowned with a different holy person. You get a great view of the city and can appreciate the intricate detail on every block of stone. Little vignettes and angles are incised in each cross-beam and capital. I almost typed that they’re mostly ignored by tourists, but you have to ignore most of the masons’ efforts, or you would never get off the roof.

Carvings that arch over a nondescript pathway. How many hours does it take to carve something like that? Now you know why it took 500 years to pull this off.

Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II: One of the prototypical shopping malls. It was built in the 1870s to celebrate Italian unity (Emanuele II was the first king of Italy). Steel and glass domes and ceilings cover designer stores so chic I’ve never heard of them.

The main attraction is the mosaic work. Allegories of the four continents look down on the central mosaic which has symbols of each of the major Italian cities. I forget which city he represents, but one of these mosaics depicts a small white cow. For good luck, you put your foot on his crotch and spin. Everyone does it - tourists, school-kids, locals – they all spin on the poor animal. The best place to watch the spectacle is to settle into a chair at McDonalds, where you can get a beer for 2.50 E. Beverages at any other café in the Galleria would have set us back 8 or 9. Thank you Mr. Steves.

As Josh and I enjoyed the novelty of McDonald’s beer, an older woman next to us shyly interrupted and pointed at us. We heard some Italian and the word “Gee-mon-ee” followed by an interrogative pitch-change. I nodded. It’s a bad habit. When someone starts speaking to me in a foreign language, I default to affirmation. I suspect this will get me into trouble at some point in the near future. In this case though she simply looked satisfied with my “Si.” Only later did I realize “Gee-mon-ee” was “gemelli” or “twin.” We got frustrated. Sure we’re both blond and have blue-ish eyes. We look like brothers, but don’t look identical. For one, I’m significantly more attractive than Josh. Maybe all Americans look the same to the Italians. Next...Art! Opera!