Milan: My Gray Grand Dame Turns Golden

How taking a cooking class transforms a Milan experience

There’s a sensation, a click that happens when my trip to Italy truly begins. It’s not the moment when the plane lands. It’s that click when I first feel the heart and soul of it. The sight of a signora on a bicycle crossing the Arno as I cab into Florence, a church bell ringing in Rome, the pop of a prosecco bottle in my hotel room in Venice. My heart expands in my chest, a calming warmth flows in, La Dolce Vita takes hold of me.

There is no click when the train pulls into Milano Centrale. It’s bone-chilling damp. I rummage through my purse for gloves.

(Wikimedia, Andrzejo)

I step into the stazione to meet Milan: She’s pompous, Italy’s money maker, Fashion Capital of the World. She is my Gray Grand Dame.

A rush of international travelers surrounds me in this vast space — a maze of escalators, steel canopy, billboards, fascist marble friezes of muscular workers, winged horses.

Per usual, it’s raining. Up goes my umbrella as I zig-zag through traffic and along wide boulevards to the enormous piazza where the Gothic Duomo cuts into the mist, with its pointy spires, countless saints, gargoyles.