Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
boutiques selling expensive adornments for the body: shoes, handbags, leather goods, jewellery, designer
clothing that hung on the body like sacking and cost a fortune. Things reached a kind of understated
intensity on the Via Montenapoleone, an anonymous-looking side street but none the less the most
exclusive shopping artery in the country, and lined with ritzy stores where the password was clearly 'Money's
no object'. Apart from the old shopping arcade, Milan appeared to have no caf￩ life at all. There were a few
establishments, but they were all hole-in-the-wall stand-up places, where people would order a small coffee,
toss it back and return to the street all in five seconds. That wasn't what I was looking for.
After southern Italy, Milan seemed hardly Italian at all. People walked quickly and purposefully, swinging
shopping bags with names like Gucci and Ferragamo on them. They didn't dawdle over espressos and tuck
into mountainous plates of pasta, napkins bibbed into their collars. They didn't engage in passionate
arguments about trivialities. They took meetings. They made deals. They talked into car phones. They drove
with restraint, mostly in BMWs and Porsches, and parked neatly. They all looked as if they had just stepped
off the covers of
Vogue
or
GQ.
It was like an outpost of southern California in Italy. I don't know about you,
but I find southern California hard enough to take in southern California. This was Italy - I wanted
pandemonium and street life, people in sleeveless vests on front stoops, washing hanging across the
streets, guys selling things from pushcarts, Ornella Muti and Giancarlo Giannini zipping past on a Vespa.
Most of all, I wanted a cup of coffee.
In the morning I went to the Brera Gallery, hidden away on a back street and reached through a
courtyard in a scaffolding-covered palazzo. Big things were going on here: plaster dust hung in the air and
there was a commotion of hammering and drilling. The gallery seemed to be only half open. Several of the
rooms were closed off and even in the open rooms there were lots of rectangles of unfaded wallpaper
where pictures had been lent out or sent away for restoration. But what remained was not only sensational
but familiar - Mantegna's foreshortened body of Christ, a Bellini madonna, two Canalettos recently and
glowingly restored, and Piero della Francesca's gorgeously rich but decidedly bizarre 'Madonna with Christ
Child, Angels, Saints and Federico da Montefeltro' - our old friend the Duke of Urbino again.
I didn't understand this picture at all. If it was painted after the Duke died and here he was now in
heaven, why was Christ a baby again? On the other hand, were we to take it that the Duke had somehow
managed to fly through the centuries in order to be present at Christ's birth? Whatever the meaning, it was a
nifty piece of work. One man liked it so much that he had brought his own folding chair and was just sitting
there with arms crossed looking at it. The best thing about the Brera was that there was hardly anyone there,
just a few locals and no foreign tourists but me. After Florence, it was bliss to be able to see the paintings
without having to ask somebody to lift me up.
Afterwards I walked a long way across the city to see Leonardo's 'Last Supper' in the refectory beside
the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. You pay a load of money at a ticket window and step into a bare,
dim hall and there it is, this most famous of frescoes, covering the whole of the far wall. A railing keeps you
from approaching any closer than about twenty-five feet, which seems unfair since it is so faint that you
could barely see it from five feet and must strain to the utmost to see anything at all from twenty-five feet. It's
like a ghost image. If you hadn't seen it reproduced a thousand times before, you probably wouldn't be able
to recognize it at all. One end was covered with scaffolding and a great deal of gleaming Dr Who-like
restoration equipment. A lone technician was on a platform scratching away. They have been working on
the 'Last Supper' for years, but I couldn't see any sign that the thing was actually coming to life.
Poor old Leonardo hasn't been too well served by history. The wall began to crumble almost
immediately (some of it had been built with loose dirt) after he finished painting it, and some early friars cut
a door into it, knocking off Christ's feet. Then over time the chamber stopped being a refectory and became
in turn a stable (can you imagine that - a roomful of donkeys with the greatest painting in history on the
wall?), a storage-room, a prison and a barracks. Much of the earlier restoration work was not, to put it
charitably, terribly accomplished. One artist gave Saint James six fingers. It is a wonder that it survived at
all. In point of fact, it hasn't really. I don't know what it will be like after another ten or fifteen years of
restoration work, but for now it would be more accurate to say that this is where the 'Last Supper' used to
be.
I slotted 1,000 lire into a machine on the wall, knowing that it would be a mistake, and was treated to a
