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Milan

— Think of Italy and the Pisan belltowers and Roman arenas of our mind aren't usually capped with snow. It's February and this is Milan!”

Think of Italy and the Pisan belltowers and Roman arenas of our mind aren’t usually capped with snow.

However it’s February and Milan stands shivering in the shadow of the Alps. The taxi pulls away and we stand shivering in Milan. We think of our wintry trip to Florence some years ago.

We’re a day early for our appointment with Leonardo, so we get settled in. Within a few minutes, so does the snow.

Next morning the sun comes up and the white stuff starts to melt off, cloaking the city in a mysterious, biscuit-coloured haze. We walk through districts where lives are connected by buzzer and intercom, where business is conducted in gated courtyards.

Milan is content to let us browse while it gets on with the accounts.

Cenacolo Vinciano: Leonardo’s The Last Supper

Thanks to the efforts of Dan Brown and others of a similar stripe, it’s pretty tough these days to see Leonardo Da Vinci’s fresco The Last Supper.

I’m thinking about this as a Dominican in a purple cloak and a natty little bonnet shuffles through the courtyard opposite. Between this prim old priest and I is a heavy gate, shielding one of us from the other. I’m holding onto my place at the front of a long queue.

Off to my right, there’s Bramante’s somewhat excessive apse of the Santa Maria delle Grazie. In 1943, everything between the apse and where I’m standing was rubble.

Fortunately The Last Supper survived intact. A temporary exhibition of photos in the Pinacoteca Brera later showed us the extent of the damage. Behind a scaffolded temporary wall, Leonardo’s masterpiece survives more or less unscathed, miraculous and mocking the destructive technology of our times.

Of course, Leonardo came to Milan as a designer of destructive technologies – among other things – and his fresco is nothing if not self-destructive. Painted in an experimental (or scornful, it’s tempting to say) mix of tempera and other materials, it was much deteriorated even in Vasari’s time barely a half century later.

J thinks Leonardo would have enjoyed the spectacle. A series of security doors to the climate-controlled space that was once the convent’s refectory. We gaze up at his work, fantastically restored in the twenty years up to 1999, and we wonder in whispers if the polymath who painted it could have foreseen his impact on posterity.

Biblioteca Ambrosiana

Meeting up with Leonardo again the next day, this time at the Ambrosiana where pages from his Codices are on temporary display, we encounter the man behind the legend.

Splendid are his grand machines and detailed studies of anatomy, but equally exciting are his marginalia: jottings of expenses, books lent, people to see. His humanity improved by unwittingly colloquial translations.

Cimitero Monumentale

In the cold morning sunshine, I feel a bit uneasy about being here in Milan’s enormous monumental cemetery. Most of the folks here are carrying bunches of flowers.

These people are visiting the dead. I’m taking pictures of their graves.

To call them ‘graves’ is actually a grave injustice. Mausolea would be a more appropriate description and in all the architectural flavours of the world. Toward the centre of the complex – and without a hint of ridiculousness – the dead are trying to outdo each other on their plots.

Precipitous pyramids and lofty cupolas and severe busts and weeping angels.

What’s fascinating is that this place somehow retains a real sense of peaceful dignity. I’m humbled, not by the magnificence of the monuments, but the sincerity of the gesture.

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Milan

J's special birthday visit to Italy's second city on a cold winter weekend.