Milano - a mixed day

Today started in a very leisurely manner after the exertions of yesterday, and we didn't leave the hotel until 10 am. The first goal was to walk to Gambara metro station - accomplished with no problems. Buying metro tickets was slightly problematic at first (I chose a machine that didn't work), but was easy to learn once someone showed me what to do. The next goal was to travel to the Duomo - easy because this is eight stops away from Gambara with no changes.

Once at the Duomo we looked around and took pictures, just like everyone else. At the top of the large piazza in front of the Duomo are situated the hop-on/hop-off buses. A 24 hour ticket cost 25€, not 22€ as advertised (probably an old price); I would be pushed to say that we got our money's worth. The first bus ride that we took was the Red line; we didn't see anything interesting on this ride except for the Milano Centrale train station that is an extremely imposing building. There was a cold wind blowing that didn't help our general disappointment.

After we returned to the Duomo piazza, we walked to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, chic shopping arcade. This too was a disappointment, apart from the mosaics on the floor. The pictures of the arcade and the Duomo must have been taken at night, because not a soul can be seen in them. In real life, they are teeming with people, especially the arcade. At the far side of the arcade is a garden area with an interesting statue of Leonardo (presumably da Vinci). This was more interesting than the previous three activities.

Once we had finished there, I suggested that we walk back to the bus stop at the Duomo so that we could try another line. First we had to stop at a restaurant where we had a reasonable lunch, once again spaghetti al pomodoro. The price rises each time we have this.

Back at the bus stop, a D line bus was waiting. Once underway, its route was slightly more interesting until we came to the Castello stop; I saw far away some form of castle and suggested that we get off the bus to explore - after all, this is the point of the hop-on/hop-off experience.

A good call! It turned out that this castle was the Castello Sforzesco although at first we weren't aware of all its offerings. The first thing that we saw were the water spouts in the front of the castle. Once past this, we saw that the castle had a wide courtyard - the atmosphere reminded me of the grounds around the leaning tower of Pisa. We continued to walk further into the castle grounds and found another courtyard that led to another courtyard then out of the castle.

Behind the castle is Parco Sempione which itself seems to be made up of several parts with a small lake in the middle. I continued walking to the end (or possibly the beginning) of the park in order to take pictures of the gate and the sculpture above it. I measured the distance from where I was (not even at the end of the park) back to the castle - just under a kilometre.

After thoroughly enjoying the castle and its environs, we decided not to continue our bus journey as there was a metro stop by the castle entrance and this stop was on the same line as both the Duomo and our local metro stop. So we returned to our starting point and I brought us home to the hotel. Afterwards I went out in a different direction to the Carrefour market in order to buy food - much cheaper than eating in restaurants all the time.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
838	04/05/2015	Losing the grouping	ERP, Excel
1026	04/05/2017	Priority tip: default parameter values	Priority tips
1498	04/05/2022	Carole Bayer Sager autobiography	Carole Bayer Sager, Song writing, Non-fiction books