Milan, Italy - Sept 7 to 8, 2009

We arrived in Milan on Monday September 7th (Duke's Birthday!!). We got in fairly late (all the blog posts seem to start this way...) so we just walked around near the hostel the first evening. we stopped by the Cathedral. It is one of the largest Gothic cathedrals in the world. We also checked out the big plaza in the area with a statue of Leonardo da Vinci.

One of the statues on the outside had his entrails falling out. We didn't do a tour or anything, so we don't know the significance of it...


The shopping area across the plaza from the cathedral:


You are supposed to place your heel inside this hole and spin 360 degrees for good luck:


The next morning we got more of an early start. We started the day by checking out the inside of the cathedral. After that we grabbed a bite to eat at a panini shop and made our way to a Leonardo da Vinci Science and Technology museum. The museum was great! They had built models of most of Leonardo's inventions. We spent the whole afternoon because the place was huge. There was floors dedicated to Rail, Boat and Air travel. The air travel exhibit was pretty cool. They had a bunch of old planes and helicopters. They also had engines in chronological order dating back to the 25hp ones from the early 1900s.




Here is a flying machine:


Another flying machine:

This was a special retractable? bridge. It could be pulled back by turning the crank:


This was an early battleship, it was one of the first to have a rotatable catapult so you could attack ships at any angle as opposed to having to be side by side:


This was the first fully automated loom:


This invention was used for underground digging:

I think this one was for pounding gold into foil:
Not a Leonardo invention, but still a sweeeeet ride:




We were hoping to see Leonardo's Last Supper painting. We stopped at the museum and waited in line, but when we got to the front they said there was a 1 month waiting list to get in! Luckily there was a very large re-make of it in the Leonardo Da Vinci museum we visited earlier so we can just pretend we seen the original... haha.

Overall we weren't very impressed with the city of Milan itself. It seems like a regular crowded old city, nothing too spectacular to (maybe we have just seen too much in the past month). The museum and cathedral were great, but we wouldn't recommend going out of your way to visit Milan. It makes for a quick day trip to break up the Interlaken to Venice train ride...

Now we are off to Venice!!!