Milan through our eyes…

Oh wow… We really loved Milan. This is the overall post, where we briefly tell you about our experience. First thing that struck us about Milan is how different it is compared to Rome. I mean, this is such a trendy and cosmopolite city, not that Rome isn’t, but Milan reminds us more about Wien. Everything about this long weekend was just perfect!

Basically, as you roam the streets of this beautiful city, you can’t help but get infested by its beauty. Art, architecture and fashion are at home in Milan and to be honest, I can’t wait for us to go to Florence as I’ve heard that it’s the most beautiful city Italy has to offer. We’ll probably do a long weekend there at some point. True, Milan is a tourist attraction because of the whole fashion influence it has over the entire world, but for some reason, and I suspect part of the reason is the fact that the main landmarks are luxury shops, it’s not as packed full of tourists as Rome. I am not going to waste you time with the places you have to visit as you can very well find those in any given tourist guide, but I am going to tell you that this city requires comfortable shoes as it’s a pity to not visit it by foot.

With that in mind, I have to brag about the fact that my Jawbone tracker was very proud of my activity these past few days. Getting to Milan is quite easy from Bucharest as there are quite a few airlines that offer a wide variety of flight hours. The flight is about 2 hours which is very manageable and you should keep in mind that it will be best to land on Linate airport as that one is the closest to Milan and the taxi fare to the central area is only about 20 Euros. Food wise, there are a few places one should try once there, but naturally we will have a few posts on specific restaurants, however, you should try the fashion cafes as their menu is very trendy and the food is exceptional. We did that for two lunch stops at Gucci and Replay. To express more clearly the great quality of the ingredients in these kind of places, at Replay, D had the tartare burger, which is basically raw meat with bread and parmesan. If the meat is bad than you instantly get sick and you can’t eat it, but D loved it. I also had one of the best caprese salads there, and yes, one could argue that a caprese salad is basically tomatoes with buratta, but the ingredients always make a difference. So, go ahead and try some of these fancy terraces while there. I should mention that at Replay the check was about 40 Euros, but the food was delicious and you should expect a bigger check just because you eat on denim tablecloth.

Obviously, at some point we encountered a PRIDE party, which was one of the most peaceful and lovely street parties we’ve ever been to. Everyone was friendly and they had a great DJ that kept everything on the fun side. The nice thing about it was that there was a wide variety of street food available on the spot and everything looked amazing, too bad we stumbled upon the party after our dinner cos if not, I would’ve tried a lot of things there.

Another great area we discovered and really should make the object of one of the walks in Milan is the Pagano-Fiera area. According to the people living in Milan, that is the real central area of the city, and we’ve eaten there on two occasions and I have to say that the food was amazing. Aside from the food, this area houses one of the most expensive residential places in Italy. For the architecture junkie in me, seeing the way the area was built really made my whole Milan experience complete. That is mainly a spot that deserves a walk in the evening as the new residential complex is beautifully accentuated with architectural lightning.

I didn’t mention the Dome area intentionally, because all the tourists guide talk exclusively about it, and yes, it is beautiful, and yes, one should visit it while in Milan, but we normally are more focused on the less known areas of any new city we visit. Shopping wise, this central area is probably the best, as prices tend to not spike here, or anywhere actually and, if you have accommodation centrally, there’s really no point in thinking that you can get a better deal if you go further from the centre (we’ve tried it!). You’ll just waste your money on taxis or metros. Two more places that really need a visit from anyone travelling to this part of Italy is the Sempione Park and the Alfa Romeo Museum. As you’ve probably noticed, we are big park fans as well as cars lovers so none of these two landmarks could’ve been missed. We’ll have an entire post on the Alfa Romeo Museum simply because we both love Alfas.

Other things to mention about Milan… this is really the shopping mecca of Europe in my opinion, not that it has more shops that London or Paris, but simply because they’re not as packed full of tourists and as opposed to Paris where there’s constantly a line in front of Louis Vuitton or Christian Louboutin, here you actually have the peace and quiet needed to enjoy spending your money. As you’ve probably figured it out by now, we had a great time in Milan and this city reopened our appetite for Italian cities!

L.