Milan; Tuesday, 29 September, 2009

I checked out of the hotel and caught the tram and trolley bus round to the central station to drop by bags off for the morning, and then wandered back over to the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie.

The church, originally part of a monastery, is quite spectacular, but the main reason people visit is for the painting in the old refectory of the monastery. In fact so many people want to visit, and so fragile is the work, that you have to book months in advance to get a chance to see it. The work is “The Last Supper” by Leonardo Da Vinci, and when I arrived the tickets had sold out until November.

Thankfully, I had booked online at the end of June, but even then had only just got a ticket for a reasonable slot. My visit wasn’t due until 13:15, but I needed to pick the ticket up in advance, and I wanted to have a look at the rest of the church (and more importantly, as I needed to get back to the station and then the airport quite quickly after the visit), find out the easiest way of getting there and back.

I had a good look around the church, and then with nearly two hours before my ticket time, had a bit of a wander around the area of the old, now vanished, canal near the Garibaldi station.

Having taken a look around, and stopped for a quick lunch, I headed back to Santa Maria for my turn to have a look at the Last Supper. Getting into the refectory is a slow process, as they put you through a number of air tight, and gradually cooling, rooms to ensure that the humidity in the room is not affected by lots of people coming straight in from a hot square outside.

You go in as part of a party of 25, no more than this is allowed in another attempt to keep the damage to the painting to a minimum, the main problem being that Leonardo used the wrong type of paints and the wrong technique, so that the painting was already degrading within a decade of it’s painting.

After taking in the painting you exit, as you would in any good museum, via the gift shop, and back out to the square in front of the church.

Then it was time to head for the station to pick up my luggage and then get out to the airport. I could have wandered back across town to the north station and catch the train back to terminal 1 and then the inter-terminal bus to terminal 2, but as the express coach to Terminal 2 leaves from outside the station I thought I would catch that.

I made the mistake of sitting at the front, and after about 10 minutes of the journey was convinced that I wasn’t going to make it to the airport. We had already been involved in several near misses, and were currently tail-gating a cement lorry down the autostrada at over 100Km/H.

We did make it to the airport in one piece, but as a sign of the driving, when the luggage doors opened a lot of the bags fell out as they had been moved around so much! I grabbed my bag, joined a queue for checkin and started the journey back home.