On the Road with the Ashbys

Tag: Italy

  • Day 2 – Duomo di Milan & Last Supper

    Day 2 – Duomo di Milan & Last Supper

    Turns out jet lag is real. We slept from about 9 pm to 11 am and were forced to have pizza for brunch.

    Pizza AM

    Sufficiently fueled up, we headed to the Duomo di Milano – the third largest church in the world and the largest Gothic Cathedral. It is 150 meters long and 105 meters high, and has more than 3,000 statues and 115 spires. It only took a mere 600 years to complete.

    Then it was off to Santa Maria delle Grazie – a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the home to a little painting you might have heard of: The Last Supper. We only had 15 minutes in the room, but could have spent hours to be honest. You can’t take your eyes off da Vinci’s masterpiece. Amazingly, it came within a few feet of being destroyed by a WWII bomb. On the opposite wall was Crucifixion, painted by Giovanni Donato da Montorfano.

    We capped off our first full day in Italy with a wonderful dinner at Risoelatte Duomo.

    More tomorrow!

  • Day 1 – Milan

    Day 1 – Milan

    Well that was certainly not on our bingo card. Pretty much at the exact halfway point of our roughly nine hour flight – so completely in the middle of nowhere over the Atlantic – a passenger suffered a diabetic episode in which his blood pressure plummeted.

    Luckily for him, a group of four nurses in our section quickly sprang into action. With the help of the flight attendants, they got him on the ground and started oxygen and an IV. Thanks to calm and quick action by trained professionals, they got him stabilized and were able to assist him to a lie-flat seat in another section of the plane so he could be more comfortable as he continued to recover.

    Back to the normally scheduled events…

    Or so we thought. That’s when our driver picked us up for the hour-long trip to our flat. And he proceeded to almost hit a hearse, almost sideswipe a moped and almost use a turn signal. But we quickly learned, that’s how all Italians – or at least the Milanese – drive. There are a lot of almosts.

    Knowing we were most likely going to be tired from all the travel, we didn’t have anything official on the itinerary for the day.

    So after showering and a quick cat nap, we proceeded to walk seven miles exploring the city – including stumbling on a random Roman wall – and ended the day with a wonderful dinner in the canal district.

    More tomorrow!

    Roman wall
    Canal District
    Cheers!
    Dinner at El Brellin
  • Andiamo in Italia!

    Andiamo in Italia!

    Kara and I first brought up the idea of a family trip with Kaitlin, Madeline and David when we were in North Carolina for Christmas.

    After we decided on Italy, Madeline did a great job researching options to get us all to Atlanta so we could take the same flight to Milan.

    We all had delays because of morning storms in Atlanta, but turns out we had plenty of time to spare as they held the plane for 20 minutes to wait for passengers from a Chicago flight. Technically, Madeline and David made it to the gate seven minutes before the boarding was originally supposed to close.

    As you can tell, we all made it and are off to Milan. (And the youngins are enjoying the free drinks on the international flight.)

    More to come!