The Italian Paradox

I spent my last day in Italy in Monza. To get to Monza from Milan, you take the train from the dreaded Porta Garibaldi train station. The train will probably be filthy and you may well not be able to see out of the graffiti covered windows, but this doesn't actually matter very much because you are about to travel through some of the ugliest parts of Milan's ugly outskirts.

Then you will get off the train and find yourself in the Italian version of Perfectville. The charming cobbled streets are punctuated with flower displays and the occasional water feature and lined with small independent shops selling artisanal products. Monza has its own La Rinascente. It has a cathedral. It has historic columns in the centre. It has an extensive park that is probably the biggest green space in the whole of Greater Milan. Monza is nice.





There isn't acutally a lot to do in Monza, unless you are into Formula 1 and it happens to be a race day. I spent most of my time sitting on a bench in the park soaking up the sunshine, watching the swans glide across the water and wondering what it is about Italy.

What is it about Italy that captures your heart even when you live in one of the ugliest, most polluted industrial cities in Europe? What is it that makes you feel excited to be alive there even as the smog is probably slowly killing you? How can it have the most frustrating bureaucracy and the craziest drivers you will ever encounter and still make you feel more relaxed than you have ever felt before? How can bite you again and again with its corruption and exploitation and still make you feel like you betrayed a little piece of your heart when you left?

I don't know how it does any of these things, but it does.

Monte Boletto

It's almost one month since I was in Italy, and high time I finished posting about my trip, but I think subconsciously, I've been putting off writing this particular post.

On the Monday morning, as my friends set off for work, I took the train up to Como to do a walk that I had been wanting to do for a long time. You take the funiular to Brunate and follow the signs to the “faro”, the lighthouse that stands a little higher up on the hillside. From the lighthouse, you follow the red and white signs, which lead you further up the hill, through villages and forest and up on to the mountain ridge. You can follow the "Dorsale" path right the way to Bellaggio, but I stopped at the top of Monte Boletto.

I think I've been scared of posting about this hike because words can't do it justice. Even the photos don't do it justice. When I arrived at th top of the mountain, less than two hours' walk from Como, and saw the dark lake at my feet and the snowy mountains stretching out into the distance above it, their summits reaching ever higher, I felt that I might be in the most beautiful place in the world, and the joy that I felt was bittersweet, because when I left Italy last summer, I left all that world and all its adventures so far behind.

Brunch

After our crazy night out in the hotspots of Milan, my friends and I decided to have a quiet day on Sunday, the highlight of which was trying out the totally not Italian tradition of brunch. Brunch in Milan, from what I could tell, is a very expensive way of buying a high quality version of what in the UK we call pub food. And yes, they call it “brunch.” After failing to get a table at the Californian bakery, we ended up at Exploit, which is near the columns and not at all far from the places we had visited the night before. I made the mistake, when ordering the “hamburger exploit” of assuming that the name of the place had been borrowed from English and not French. Luckily, the snooty waiter quickly corrected me and my pronunciation. Had I been feeling a bit more on the ball, I would have insisted on placing my entire order in French, but unfortunately my brightest ideas only come to me long after the opportunity to use them has passed, so at the time I just smiled sweetly and pretended to be interested.

Luckily the food, when it came, was actually very nice.

Nightlife in Milan

After our exhausting day strolling around Pavia, taking photos and relaxing in cafés in its quiet piazzas, we headed out in Milan for well-earned aperitivo. J had reserved a table at Cheese on Via Lupetta, opposite the church of Sant'Alessandro...or so she thought, until we turned out and they had no idea who she was. Luckily it turned out that the table was actually booked at Yguana, the bar next door which has the same phone number. It also provides the same food, which was the best of Italian aperitivo – lots of salad and lots of pasta to make you feel full without having eaten a huge amount – and serves very nice cocktails. It was absolutely packed and they kept trying to convince us to give away seats at our table for ten, but eventually everyone arrived and we were so squashed in that there was no way anybody was moving anywhere. After that we moved on to La Toscana, a relaxed bar on the Corsa di Porta Ticinese, which has nice squishy seats and had a bit more room to breathe. At 2 am, we still weren't quite ready to go home, so we spent an hour or so in Cuore, a bar around the corner(ish) which had very bright lights, bad music and a tiny and overstuffed dancefloor but had the advantage of being open late and having some extremely good-humoured bar staff. The night ended with a long search for a taxi. We walked up to the Duomo, where there were none, and ended up calling one of the companies after about half an hour. Our friends who walked down to the Navigli, where it's usually easier to find a taxi, ended up breaking up a fight on the way though, so we probably did choose the right direction!

Pavia

After going out for an enormous pizza and my first limoncello of the year on Friday night, I stayed with my friends J and L in Milan and we got up early enough on Saturday morning to go to Pavia. Pavia turned out to be another one of the places that I couldn't believe I hadn't discovered in a whole year of living in Italy. For anyone in Milan who feels as if they are missing out on the experience of living in a proper little Italian town, Pavia, only half an hour away on the train, is the perfect escape. It had a busy market, but the rest of the town was quiet, even on a Saturday afternoon. It does have a university though, and there were hints of some lively student life going on. It also has lots of beautiful churches, some of which were very different from any I had seen in Italy before, and is famous for its towers, which stretch up tall and straight to look out over the plains that surround the town.

The church of San Michele Maggiore. It was built of sandstone and a lot of the detail of the carving has been eroded, but it still looks amazing.

Sunken church. Unfortunately it was closed, so we couldn't go inside.

Santa Maria del Carmine. Lots of the old buildings in Pavia are built from these red bricks, often arranged so that they stick out in funny ways from the facades of the buildings.

The Torre Civico. It collapsed in 1989 and, tragically, several people were killed.

Towers

Towers and the university gate. I would have happily studied here!