Italia mon amour

Just over a week ago, I got on a train in the Gare de Lyon. We sped across France, the Alps and the plains of northern Italy, and seven hours and fifteen minutes later, I stepped off the train at Milano Centrale and back into my old life.

And for one week, I lived that life again (in fact, it was better than my old life, because I was on holiday and didn't have to go to work) and I remembered how much I loved it. Then, seven days later, I got back on the train, and seven hours later, was back in my French life again.

The trip was amazing. Sad, in some ways, because it reminded me of things that I had left behind, but satisfying too, because it showed me that many of these things are there, no further than a train journey away.

I spent the first day walking around Milan, reminding myself of all the familiar places and discovering the coffee shop in the Mondadori bookshop on the Piazza del Duomo, which has delicious hot chocolate, comfortable chairs and a great view of the square and the cathedral. Then I walked down to the Navigli, caught the metro back to the castle and the Parco Sempione, wandered around some of my favourite shops, and went back for more coffee in Mondadori. Here are some of the more picturesque things that I saw:

Ritorno a Milano

I went back to Milan last weekend for the first time since I moved away in August, what seems like seven very long weeks ago. As I was expecting, it was an emotional weekend. Mr A and I broke up when he was here in the summer and visiting Milan really brought home to me the reality of what had happened. Needless to say, that hurt.

At the same time, though, the visit was a very positive experience. I was worried that I would have grown apart from my friends since last year and that without working together we would have nothing to talk about any more, but in fact that wasn't the case at all. On Friday night I slept at my friend S's house and we stayed up until 3 in the morning catching up, then on Saturday night a big group of us from my old work went out for pizza and drinks (which turned into pizza, profiteroles, ice cream... and drinks) and had a great time.

On Saturday, I stayed with two other friends and we spent most of Sunday making ravioli from scratch:




The whole process took about 4 hours, so I ended up scarfing my bowl in about 20 minutes and running off to the airport, but it was worth it just for the fun of the cooking!

The weekend was tiring and all too short, but I was glad that I went. Lots of the good things about Italy are good in France too, but Italy has this kind of exuberance that makes you smile and makes you cry in a way that no other country I know of does. Like when I was in the supermarket and the woman in front of me paid with a handful of small coins. “Della moneta – che bello!” rejoiced the checkout assistant. Or when after all those hours in the kitchen, we finally sat down to eat and realised that the pasta was delicious and we had made it all ourselves. Or when my my plane took off from Malpensa as night was falling and I caught a glimpse of the mountains rising out of the clouds into the darkness and realised that despite everything that had happened recently, Italy, that other love of my life, was still going to be there for me.

On The Other Side Of The Mountains

I learned a new Italian word the other day: oltralpe, meaning "on the other side of the Alps" and, in the article that I was reading, referring to France.

In France, a similar expression used to refer to Britain is "outre - Manche" or "on the other side of the channel". An English equivalent might be "on the continent" but, while the English expression generally refers to a glamorous place where the people have exotic quirks like drinking tea with lemon and driving on the wrong side of the road, I have long harboured the suspicion that "outre - Manche" implies something more along the lines of "beyond the pale", with the only worse geographical slur being "outre Atlantique", but this might just be down to the contexts I've encountered the expression in. Any Francophones care to comment?

Anyway, as well as taking delight in my own cleverness at figuring out the meaning of oltralpe, the cynical, twisted part of me was quite pleased to discover that maybe, just maybe, the Italians harbour a similar "us and them" attitude towards the French.

More on this later, if my dear readers on the other side of the mountains will promise not to be offended...