The medication I took for my gut issues worked well. I may never have a bowel motion again but that’s a small price to pay to enable me to get out and about and make the most of my time overseas.
Simon brought home a test sandwich for me to eat for lunch, and as there were no ill effects, we set off walking across town to the tour meeting point.
The church square where we met was heaving with tourists looking anxious and lost so it’s obviously a popular meeting point. Simon had paid $200 each for us, and we were expecting a very small group for such a high-end tour. Not so, in fact; there were over twenty of us. It turns out that the only way to see The last supper is with a tour group, as independent tickets sell out many months in advance, so it’s a kind of surge pricing, like Uber or Oasis tickets. Whoever thought that free markets would solve all the world’s problems was very naive, or full of self interest. Probably the same economist who thought up trickle-down theory.
I’ve seen the painting before but Simon hadn’t, although he’d watched documentaries on it. It was more deteriorated than I remember, because of the painting technique Da Vinci used. Luckily some devotee painted a faithful copy only 20 or years later, oil on canvas, and it’s in far better condition, with many more details visible than you can now see on the original, so I would just go and see that or one of the other copies if I was you. That first copy is hanging up in London somewhere but of course you can see it online. I enjoyed reading The Da Vinci Code years ago, a guilty pleasure. I can’t remember much about it but John certainly looks very feminine, as Dan Brown pointed out. You were allowed to take photos in the 15 minutes viewing time allowed to us, but not videos. Several people in our group got told off for taking videos. What’s the point in taking a video of a still image? Crazy.
The picture depicts the moment Jesus tells his disciples that one of them would betray him. Spoiler left, it was Judas, fourth from the left. The painting is on the wall of the dining hall of the friars, who got quite disgruntled when it took Leonardo four years to complete it. They ended up enlarging a door into the wall underneath it to facilitate access to a kitchen, which is quite the passive aggressive move in my opinion.
The remaining time on our tour was spent walking around town looking at the outside of some famous buildings: The Duomo cathedral, the castle, La Scala theatre, and a quick whizz through a posh shopping mall. There’s a mosaic on the floor of the latter that depicts a bull, legend has it that if you put your heel on the bulls testicles and spin around three times anticlockwise, you’ll get good luck. There was a big crowd of tourists doing it when we were there, although they were going clockwise so I don’t know what that does to the spell or charm or whatever it is. Harmless hooey you may think, but it wears a whole in the floor which has to be repaired reasonably frequently.
At the end of the tour, the guide gave us a recommendation for dinner, a little authentic restaurant that wasn’t touristy at all. We went there and it was full of tour groups but the food was fine. We both had the same starter which sounded delicious but ended up being a deep fried cheese toastie, but the mains were better. I had a very nice risotto and Simon had Osso Bucco with Milanese risotto, very traditional.
When we got home, and as we were making plans for the following day, I explained to Simon my theory about getting different experiences from a holiday when someone else organises it. For example, I thought he was mad to hire a car just to put it in a parking lot for three days, rather than just taking a train. Clearly I’m not explaining myself very well, because sadly he got all huffy. Alternatively, maybe I’m just a bitch and I should keep my unpopular opinions to myself if I want to maintain my relationships.