Last day of our trip, Milan!

9/29

We started out early this morning, having breakfast at the B&B before checking out and getting on our train to Milan. When we arrived in Milan we headed right for customer service to get our refund for the taxi we had to take the other night when we missed our train. When we got there we had to fill out a paper about the incident, only to then find out that our refund would come to us in the mail. Great, now we are going to get a check in the mail for 60 Euro....what the heck are we supposed to do with that?!? We were really bummed because that meant we had to take more cash out of the bank, which we were trying to avoid...

Anyway, once in Milan we were able to check right into our hotel room and drop off our stuff before heading out to sightsee. We took the subway to see the Sforza Castle, which was really big, pretty cool looking...and to go to one of the many museums here specifically to see Michelangelo's last Pieta, which he died before completing. The Pieta is interesting because Michelangelo had completed part of it and then went back and decided to change it, so the legs of Jesus are complete and polished, and there is an arm that belonged to Jesus and would have been removed. Jesus is now sculpted coming out of Mary's shoulder instead of the traditional style of the Pieta where he is lying across her lap.

We had lunch at a little self service type restaurant that had lots of different foods out to pick from, half of the stuff we weren't sure what it was! We ended up with Lasagna with pesto, and a couple little eclairs. Then we took the tram to the church of Santa Maria della Grazie, which is the home of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. This was really awesome to see. It is a little on the soft side because of all the efforts that were made to touch it up over the years, eventually all the old touch up jobs were scraped off and it was restored a few years ago. It is a lot bigger than we expected, and it's really weird to see how a door was carved out of the bottom center of the painting...who the heck decided to do that anyway?! The opposite wall from the Last Supper is the Crucifiction. That is a very busy work compared to the last supper, and it's amazing how well both have been maintained considering pretty much everything else in the room is gone now.

Afterwards we took a tram to the Piazza del Duomo to see the Cathedral. It's absolutely massive, and it's crazy how detailed and decorated the outside is. It is in a gothic style with pink and white marble, with hundreds of sculptures on the outside and spires on top. The inside is very dark and not as open as the last few churches we've been to. Beautiful stained glass windows here, and apparently they have a nail from Jesus's cross that is only displayed a couple days a year, as well as stuff like hair and teeth from each of the apostles. We went to the treasury hoping to see some of the stuff but it wasn't there today...and the museum is closed for renovation and will open next month, so we just missed it...

There is an elevator you can take to the roof here, so we decided to do that which was really cool too. The views of the city aren't great because Milan is so modern, kinda like New York with all the big buildings... But it was cool to get up close to all the detail that is in this church.

When we got back to the ground again we walked through some of Milan's high end shopping areas oogling at the crazy prices for things here. I wonder how anyone can afford some of this stuff? Anyway, we came back to our hotel to take a little break before having dinner.

We took the subway back close to the Duomo to have dinner at a restaurant here. The caprese salad wasn't great here, but the pastas were! I had penne arrabiata and Kev got this homemade pasta with a meat sauce, kinda like a beef strogenof.(sp?) During dinner we discussed the highlights of our trip, making some top 5 lists of things we did and places we went. It's hard to remember some of the things since we've done so much! We got our last gelato before catching the subway back to our hotel. We're definitely going to miss those easy to find gelatos! We are sad that our trip is over, but excited to go back home to our family and friends!