Italia '23 part cinque: Milan

[previously: June 14-18, June 18-20, June 21-23, June 24-26]

Tuesday June 27

Just after we go to bed in our train compartment, the aircon in the ceiling starts making a noise like the entire train crew have crawled inside it and are beating their way out with hammers. The BBG wakes up briefly, reassures herself it’s not an alarm, and goes back to sleep for the rest of the night. The amount of sleep I get in the same period can, I think, be measured in minutes. Still, at least things can’t get any worse.

At 7am the train guard knocks on our door, hands us two coffees and says ‘ritardo’. That's a bit rude, I'm just tired. But we eventually realise he's telling us that the service is running late. How late? Opening the window we see we’re parked up in Roma Termini station. But this train doesn’t stop at Rome. By now we should be at least in Florence, several hours further down the line.

Then we spot the large numbers of police outside. Then the guard comes back with a box full of snacks and water.

This is looking ominous.

Eventually, word comes through from an English speaking passenger that someone’s been found dead in the next carriage along from us, and the cops have been brought in to establish foul play or otherwise. At this point, I start considering the theory that all the banging in the aircon was the ghost of the dead passenger asking us to avenge them. I don’t get much further into this line of thought before the next development – the train is officially taken out of service, and we’re all told to get off it and find alternative methods of transport.

To be fair, Trenitalia handle all this with some aplomb, despite their platform staff being mobbed by dozens of sleep-deprived passengers, the loudest of which is old and half blind and can only communicate with violent arm gestures and yelling. The guy on the platform gives us an alternative service to join, with enough time to be able to get a stand-up coffee beforehand (and I seriously need one by then). We don’t have seat reservations, but we find two free places fairly quickly, and the guard helpfully finds us a couple more that are free to the end of the journey. It’s a fast train – to be fair, most trains are fast compared against what The BBG snarkily points out is advertised as a night service rather than a sleeper service – so we get into Milan a mere 90 minutes later than planned.

“You got the full Italian experience,” says the delightful receptionist we explain all this to at the Starhotels Anderson. And for once we’re in a proper hotel, not an apartment block with B&B facilities – just like we were in London nearly two weeks ago, and for exactly the same reason. Milan is effectively a short break in our two day journey home, and we’ve got a hotel that’s over the road from Central Station so we can catch an early train first thing tomorrow. The Anderson may be the most standard hotel we’ve encountered on this trip, but its shower is incredibly welcome at this point.

Feeling moderately human again, we hit Milan for the rest of the day, in an itinerary partly informed by our previous visit in 2007. After a surprisingly decent lunch at the Mercato Centrale food court inside the station itself, we go full tourist and catch a Metro out to the Duomo. Our amusement at the network’s breathless announcement that it’s just introduced touch-in-touch-out credit card payments, years after most of the rest of the world, is tarnished by our train barrelling through Duomo station without stopping, like we’re in Catania or something.

We walk back towards the Duomo and discover what the problem is: all the streets surrounding the cathedral have been sealed off, giving us once again the chance to see how fucking angry Italians get when they can’t do something they want to. There’s a free gig this evening in the main square called Love Mi, and the area is full of thousands of kids queueing up to be squished into an undersized open space in 30+ degree temperatures. It’s fun to watch, but a little frustrating when you want to see the Duomo and all its approach roads are closed.

Except we accidentally find a hack. One of the other places we want to visit nearby is the Museo del Novecento, which to be fair was saying on its website that it was closing an hour early this evening for ‘public order reasons’, so we really should have got the hint. We persuade a guard that we’re trying to visit the museum and not just jumping the queue for the gig, and he waves us through. And once we’re inside the Museo, we discover several floor-to-ceiling windows giving us a terrific view of the cathedral and the crowds outside it (though not the stage itself). This is the cherry on top of a cake made out of an excellent collection of largely Italian futurist art, built around a zig-zaggy route that keeps you baffled as to how much more you’ve still got to see.

We decide against trying to crash Love Mi and instead go on a mini aperitivo run, something that we didn’t quite pull off successfully when we were last here 16 years ago. We start off by revisiting the bar of our hotel from that stay, Straf, and grab a quick spritz. With all the stuff going on nearby at the Duomo, it’s fun and buzzy, but we’re a little alarmed to discover that the bar has picked up a cockroach since 2007. Putting the offered nibbles to one side with a small shudder, we take a Metro out to the Naviglio Grande canal area where we had a slightly disappointing experience last time. It’s possible that was down to our previous visit being on a Monday night, when everyone was still on their comedown from the weekend. On a Tuesday night in 2023, it’s much livelier, with a nice warm evening adding to the feel. We’re pretty certain that a bar like Navigli Craft Beer wouldn’t have been there back then, but it’s a terrific addition to the area, and their taplist has a rather fine collection of Italian brews on offer.

Sticking with things we tried to do 16 years ago, we wrap things up with a tram ride out for a late dinner at Pizza OK. I remember being highly amused at the time by a restaurant name as understated as that in the middle of all the Pizza Magnificos and Pizza Fantasticos this city is full of, but not so amused that we made any attempt to eat there. Magnificently, Pizza OK turns out to serve what's probably the best pizza we have all fortnight: an ultra-thin crust, more like a flatbread, acting as the base for over 100 possible topping combinations. For dessert, we call into the Iconico gelateria to make absolutely sure we’ve had an icecream in every Italian city we've visited on this trip. By this point, the sleep deprivation of earlier in the day is a distant memory, so it’s a surprise to get back to the hotel and realise it’s gone midnight.

Wednesday June 28

And five hours later, the alarm clock goes off again. By 6.25am, we’re on a train that’s pulling out of Milan and taking us as far as Paris. It’s more successful than our last Trenitalia trip, in that we don’t see any evidence of people dying on it. We do, however, end up getting delayed anyway – by Turin we’re half an hour late, which has extended to one hour by the next stop, and we never really make up for the delay. It’s not a problem, though: our schedule for this final day has huge amounts of slack built into it, and we get to enjoy the sight of a different set of Alps from the ones we passed on the journey out, without an annoying family getting in the way.

We have an early afternoon lunch booked at the massive Parisian travel cliché that is Terminus Nord, which we cancel while on the train once it’s apparent that we’re going to be late for it. On arrival in Paris, we take a chance on a walk-in for a late afternoon lunch there, and get shown to a table straight away. Despite my ongoing qualms about it being a massive tourist trap simply due to its location across the road from the main station, it’s as enjoyable a meal as ever: it's only slightly spoilt by their insistence now on making people leave their suitcases by a counter in the middle of the restaurant, rather than keeping them by our table. Sure, it’s tidier, but we spend most of our lunch worrying about our suitcases getting nicked and us losing two weeks’ worth of sweaty underwear (plus, I guess, the snazzy outfits we got hitched in). But that doesn’t happen.

After that, it’s plain sailing (wrong metaphor) on the Eurostar and the rest of our trains home, getting us back in London just over two weeks after the ceremony that started it all. As ever, despite the fun of travelling between multiple places in a fortnight, it’s a delight to be able to sleep in our own bed again. Even though my dreams for the next couple of nights will be based around non-existent imaginary Italian cities that we were either staying in, planning to stay in, or forgot to stay in. It's like having an extra few days of travel bolted on to the end of the stuff you've paid for, and I'm choosing to view that as a happy bonus rather than a symptom of mental decline. Being a monkey, and all.

Bonus feature: The Belated Birthday Girl on eating and drinking Italian

Italy is a wonderful and diverse country, with wonderful and diverse cuisines, which is a big part of why we decided to honeymoon with a trip through various regions. There was so much terrific food and drink we had on the trip – including in Paris, en route to and from Italy – there isn’t room to write about it all without taking up far too much space, so I’m going to focus on just one or two things from each of our four main cities, with shout-out to other highlights.

Starting with Turin, where we had some wonderful meals, the highlight for me was right on the night we arrived. Taberna Libraria combined a couple of my interests, in wanting to not only sample the local cuisine, but also drink the excellent wine of the region. We were able to take advantage of the warm weather and sit at a delightful pavement table, allowing us to take in some of the atmosphere of the city and country we had just arrived in. We decided to have only a single course, and we both went for the pasta. I chose a crab dish, while Spank decided on the local Tajarin pasta with a ragu of the local Bra sausage. The Piedmont wine region, where Turin is located, produces some of the best – and certainly some of my favourite – wines in Italy, and especially is known for fabulous reds. Taberna Libraria has an excellent selection of local wines by the glass, and Spank chose the Dolcetto D’Alba, which was a wine new to us both, and was wonderful: softer and a little fruitier than the Piedmont reds I am more familiar with, and a perfect match for the ragu. Piedmont reds are probably my favourite Italian wines, but I was eating crab, which from experience I know just doesn’t work with red wine. So I decided to see what a rose made from Nebbiolo – the same grape that the great Barolo is made from - would be like and whether it would go well with the crab. The answer was that the wine was terrific – by far the best rose I have ever had, with all the complexity of the Nebbiolo grape coming through – and went perfectly with my crab. The food and wines were excellent, and the atmosphere wonderful, so we decided to have a second glass of wine, and a selection of local cheese to soak it up. Spank had another glass of the Dolcetto – now a new favourite – and I stayed with the Nebbiolo grape but switched to a red (though not a Barolo), which was also excellent, and the cheeses were also very good, and completed a lovely meal.

Before moving onto talking about our next destination, a couple of quick shout-outs to other highlights. Firstly, to toastie chain Capatoast, which we first came across at the Lingotto Centre, and which sells excellent toasties the size of a human head. Secondly, to Turin craft beer brewery EDIT, and their brewpub in Barriera di Milano, where we sampled a range of EDIT’s own beers brewed on site accompanied by some Italian pub grub, including the local style of pizza known as Pinsa.

On to Genoa, where the food was definitely a big part of what made this city the next stop on our travels. Liguria is known for excellent seafood, but when it comes to Genoa, one thing springs immediately to mind: pesto! I knew I wanted to sample some traditional local pesto, and my research had found there were a number of restaurants highly rated for their pesto and the dishes prepared with it. Unsurprisingly, all of these are very popular and it seems to be usual to have to queue to get in. We managed to try two highly-regarded places in our stay. On our first night we dined at Trattoria Delle Grazie. Tucked away down a side street, the queue was shorter than at more prominently located restaurants, and with most people wanting to sit outside ended up being quite short if you were happy with an inside table. The interior of the restaurant is quite charming, with exposed brickwork and stucco on the walls, and with tables arranged close together giving a communal atmosphere. The food was all traditional Ligurian and was very good. I started with fried anchovies, while Spank had the crostini baccala, thickly spread salt-code paste on slices of toasted bread. For the main course, Spank went for pansoti noci, a Ligurian stuffed pasta similar to ravioli, filled with local greens and cheese and served with a tasty walnut sauce. But for me it was always going to be pesto, which was served with gnocchi. The pesto was a vivid green and extremely flavourful. We washed the food down with a carafe of the house white.

There was more pesto on the menu for lunch the next day, at another of Genoa’s top places for it, Rosmarino, centrally located in the old town, just off the Piazza De Ferrari. This time we decided to take an outside seat, and were lucky with the timing of our arrival managing to get seated almost straight away. This time, Spank had the pesto, served on the traditional Ligurian trofie pasta, which was less of a vivid green than the pesto at Trattoria Delle Grazie, but no less delicious. I opted for the calamari skewers, tender and tasty with a herb crust, and beautifully presented. Some chunks of bread, and a shared side of braised courgettes, made it into a terrific lunch.

The shout-out in Genova has to be Sa’ Pesta, which opened as a restaurant in the 19th century and has been serving various traditional Genovese dishes ever since. But the speciality of the restaurant is farinata, a pancake of chickpea flour cooked in a woodfired oven in a huge copper pan and served plain or with a variety of toppings. If you are looking for something traditional but a little different, I’d highly recommend farinata at Sa’ Pesta.

From Genoa we had taken the ferry to Sicily, arriving in the capital Palermo. We decided we wanted to have a bit of a fancy meal for our first night there, and were more than satisfied with our choice of Osteria dei Vespri. We were seated at an outside table in the attractive courtyard, and the atmosphere was quite lovely. The food was a modern take on traditional food from Sicily and elsewhere in Italy, and was quite fabulous. We started with a couple of cocktails: an American Vivo and Caiprinha 2.0, which were both very good and set us up nicely. For the meal itself, we decided to have two courses of main and dessert. Spank started with the Calamarata pasta, so called because it resembles squid rings, which came with ‘nduja sauce, aubergine chips, caciocavallo cheese from Modica, basil mousse and wild fennel, while I chose the Anelletti pasta with “maiolino” octopus ragù, made with Nero d’Avola, wild fennel and Corleone saffron. Both mains were excellent, innovative dishes made from quality produce. We accompanied the mains with a glass each of a couple of Sicilian reds: Cusumano Alta Mora from Etna and Amira Nero D’Avola. Both were terrific and complemented our food nicely. Our desserts were as innovative as our mains. We chose two to share between us: the Citrus meringue, which came with chantilly cream with coffee and white pepper, Sambuca sauce and candied orange, and the Nebrodi hazelnut wafer with Gangi ricotta, lemon and cinnamon scent, Domori “Côte d’Ivoire” chocolate, sour syrup with Frappato. Both were fabulous.

For the Palermo shout-out, broadly it’s a matter of recommending eating at or near the Ballarò Market, where you will find all sorts of local Sicilian specialities such as arancini, caponata and pasta con sarde, but more specifically Trattoria il Bersagliere, near the market on Via S. Nicolò All'Albergheria, where not only did we have terrific food – the tuna Polpe were as good as the waiter recommending them had suggested – but the place had an authentic feel, frequented by locals, and the service was friendly, helpful and entertaining.

The final stop in Sicily was Catania, and once again the first place we ate in was an absolute highlight. The marina area has a lot of decent eateries, but one of the most highly rated is the Osteria Antica Marina, where we had lunch on arrival. The restaurant specialises in fish and seafood, as befits its location right by the fish market. As this was lunch we only had a single course, but what we had was excellent. I went for the paccheri con gamberi, while Spank, a fan of carbonara, had a fishy variant made with smoked swordfish, served with the local busiate pasta. In both cases the seafood was delicious and the pasta perfectly cooked.

For a final shout-out I have to mention Fud, in the busy and buzzing Via Santa Filomena area, where the quirky approach to the spelling of menu items is more than forgiven because of the quality of the food and the local craft beers.