Category: Italy

Posted on

Maserati photo shoot

DSC08912_06-23-2017

The gym that I go to in Milan is located in a landmark building called Palazzo Lombardia. I’ve been there almost every day for the past few months, but I am still very much in awe of its architecture. If you look at this complex of buildings in plan view on Google maps, it looks like flags fluttering in the wind, touching each other.

The inner courtyard is under a transparent roof, which makes this outdoor space sheltered from elements. I have seen this unique space being used as an ice rink in winter, a marketplace for local cheese and meat vendors, a concert stage and a beach volleyball, a basketball and a mini-football court (the cleanup required after the sports events was particularly impressive).

DSC08553_06-05-2017

The transparent roof also diffuses sunlight, creating ideal conditions for a photoshoot. Every now and then, I see models in the next-season clothing collections being photographed on the backdrop of the building’s glass walls. Remarkably, the photographers use very little, if any, artificial light – just a reflector or a single strobe apparently do the job.

Last Friday afternoon, I was on my way to grab my running shoes from the gym’s locker, so I could go for a run along Naviglio Martesana on the weekend. On the way, I saw two cars parked in the Palazzo’s courtyard. They were concealed under protective covers, which had conspicuous Maserati logos. I snapped a couple of pictures of them and was immediately approached by a security guard, who told me that no photos were allowed. He was very friendly though, and after I asked him what was going on and told that photography was my personal interest, he explained that they were preparing to shoot a commercial for Maserati.

Sadly, I didn’t have time to stay and watch. I did see a Lexus commercial being shot on the very same spot a couple of months earlier, though. That time, they had a DSLR-looking camera mounted on a very long (approx. 10 meters) arm attached to the side of the car. The car was just driving around the plaza in slow circles. I guess, the quality of the natural light filtering through the transparent roof, combined with a modernist architecture in the background makes the production relatively straightforward.

This is the aspect of living in a big city like Milan that I am going to miss back home – bumping into cool events every time you take a step outside.

Palazzo Lombardia. Milan. Italy.
Palazzo Lombardia. Milan. Italy.
Posted on

Late dinners

DSC08627_06-12-2017

We came across this difference in European and North American lifestyles when we were on vacation in Spain two years ago. We were in Nerja, on Costa del Sol, in the middle of summer. The days were so hot that the restaurants stayed closed until about 8 pm. So even though our daughter was only three-and-a-half years old at the time, we were forced to abandon our precious daily routine and have dinners at 9 pm or so – a time when she would typically be in bed for at least an hour.

The same thing is happening now in Milan. As the temperatures climb well above 30 degrees (C), people around us adjust by shifting their activities into the night hours. Last weekend, we went to explore the Navigli district. It is a very neat part of Milan, the main feature of which are canals (navigli) built between 1179 and 1209 to transport marble that was used for building the Duomo. Even Leonardo da Vinci contributed to Milano’s canals by designing a system of dams. There are junk antique markets and some junk unique art for sale along the Naviglio Grande. We also visited some real art galleries, where the owners and the artists were incredibly nice, eclectic and chatty. They spoiled our daughter with little souvenirs, let us pet their dogs and spoke to us in Bulgarian, which they learned in school, thinking that it was Russian.

The restaurants open for ‘aperitivi’ around 6:30 pm. It’s a happy hour – type arrangement, where for the price of a single alcoholic drink (approx. 8 Euros) the customers get the drink and unlimited access to a buffet. The actual dinners start quite bit later. This schedule is very logical and has a lot of built-in common sense. The days are so long now that it would be difficult to go to bed at our ‘normal’ hours anyway. What we are missing is a siesta in the afternoon that we really enjoyed on our vacation in Spain. Our five-year-old is still in school, but she still needs her 10 – 11 hours of sleep every day day, any cultural nuances aside. Basically, we like the European late-night lifestyle, but we are ready for a vacation with a lot of afternoon nap time.

DSC07455_05-21-2017

Posted on

Language barrier

DSC08743_06-12-2017

During this six-months-long sabbatical in Milan, we didn’t make any focused effort to learn Italian language. That is, we didn’t enroll in any courses, and our daughter went to an English-language school.

Our friends asked us recently whether we found it difficult to function in Italy using only English. Now, after almost six months I can confidently say that it was remarkably easy. Perhaps, this is due to Milan being an international metropolis, where people of many nationalities mingle and use English as their main language. But I think this lack of communication barrier is also due to the nature of people, who live here and whom we’ve been lucky to meet.

DSC08626_06-12-2017

Certainly, English is not spoken everywhere in Milan, but even where people speak only Italian, like in our favorite bakery, which we pass everyday on the way home, or in a fish store across the street from our apartment, people always greet us very warmly and make an effort to communicate.

In some cases, they very tactfully accommodate our efforts to speak Italian. For example, in a gelatteria, where we buy ice cream almost every day, I only recently discovered that the owner spoke nearly perfect English. This happened when I exceeded the capacity of my Italian and gesture language while buying gelato for a dinner party with our friends and colleagues.

DSC08620_06-12-2017

Posted on

Homemade pizza

DSC06961_04-30-2017

Some experienced travelers say that in order to fully experience the benefits of long-term travel, one needs to live in the new country for longer than 3-4 months. This initial period is needed to learn the rhythm of the community android establish new routines. I think we are getting to the point of settling in Milan only now, after living here for five months.

Our daughter’s school has a fantastic lunch program. We are certainly going to miss it when we come back to Canada. The menu, which is catered in from a restaurant, is healthy and diverse, but pizza Margarita is her favorite item. They had it for lunch today, which our daughter told us on the way from school. And then she added perhaps the best compliment my wife could hope for as a cook: “But you know, mum, I like the pizza that we make at home much better.”

Making pizza at home is our daughter’s favorite pastime. She always insists on picking up some pizza dough when we go to a supermarket. Ever since reading Pamela Druckerman’s “Bringing Up Bébé,” I have been convinced that cooking is an excellent educational activity for kids. Apparently, the quantity of our practice is starting to convert to quality, if such a discerning critic as our daughter thinks that our homemade pizza rivals one from a real Italian restaurant.

DSC08501

DSC07000_04-30-2017

Posted on

Ducati!

DSC08398

Today, we took our daughter’s bicycle to a shop in Isola to fix a hand brake cable. Actually, it is not her bike. We are borrowing it from a colleague during our stay in Milan, because his children have outgrown it.

Last summer, when we signed our daughter up for a week-long Pedalheads camp in Victoria, we could not imagine that her riding would be one of the most important and enabling skills for our sabbatical stay in Milan. In fact, she has been riding the bike so much over the last five months, that the brake cables stretched and had to be replaced.

DSC08431

On our way to the bicycle shop, we came across a motorcycle dealership/store that occupied tree corners of an intersection. Before coming to Italy, I was half-expecting a Ducati dealership at every corner. If I had seen this particular corner sooner, it would have certainly exceeded my expectations.

As we were passing by, I peeked inside the mechanic’s shop, where some bikes were being serviced. It reminded me of a documentary series that I saw a few years ago, where they compared the manufacturing processes, with all the inherent cultural nuances, of Japanese and Italian bike makers. For example, at Honda, the managers knew up to a second how long it takes to assemble a new bike (something around a minute). When they asked a Bimota mechanic the same question, he was a bit puzzled at first, and then replied: “As long as needed.” Later, as he was building the bike, he stopped a couple of times to wipe the partially-assembled motorcycle clean, because “he didn’t like how it looked covered with oil”.

There is definitely a flair of art about Italian bikes, and the un-rushed way they are built and maintained. Too bad we were pressed for time and did not stay longer and observe the masters at work. Oh, the irony!

DSC08432

Posted on

Lake Como

DSC07866_05-27-2017-Edit-Edit

Last Saturday, we went to Lake Como. Here are some notes, if you are coming just for a day trip, as we did:

  1. The town to visit is Bellagio. On the map, the lake famously looks like a stick-figure man with legs striding apart. Bellagio is located right where … it makes it a subject of crude jokes.
  2. There is no train from Milan to Bellagio. The way to go is through the town of Como, which is located at the end of the left foot, and not through Varenna (although we didn’t try the latter route).

    3. DSC07801_05-27-2017-Edit

  3. There are two train stations in Como. A more convenient one (closest to the ferry harbour) is Nord Lago. Unfortunately, you cannot get to it directly from Milano Centrale (you need to start from Cadorna FN). The trains from Centrale come to the other station in Como (St. Giovanni). It took us 20 min to walk to the habour from there.

    4. DSC07654_05-27-2017

  4. From Como to Bellagio, there are four options: bus, taxi, “fast boat” and “slow boat”. The ride on a slow boat is fantastic and is actually the highlight of the day trip. We took the fast boat on the way to Bellagio and the slow boat on the way back. The latter is much better – you are not locked inside the cabin, and the views are spectacular. It is really slow though (the one-way trip takes more than two hours). We were lucky that our five-year-old daughter was a seasoned traveler, but at that age you can get excited by only so many views of posh lakeside villas in a day.
  5. A single day trip might be too short for a truly relaxed experience. We were not rushed per se, but we were aware of the boat and train schedules, which was a bit distracting for me personally.

For photography, a telephoto lens is a must-have. The slow ferry does stop at nearly every town and brings you close to the beautiful buildings, but a long lens is indispensable for compressing perspective of the multiple layers of mountain rangesMy 70-200 weighs as much as the rest of my gear, but I used it 90% of the time (not counting the GoPro, which I camped to the railing on the ferry and just let it run during the entire ride).

DSC08053_05-27-2017-Edit

Posted on

Bosco Verticale

DSC00239_03-31-2017I read about this building, called ‘vertical forest’, six months before coming to Milan for sabbatical. It really captured my imagination. Just think about the concept: large trees growing on every balcony of a skyscraper, so that even the upper floor apartments have a forest-like view! I was really excited when I found out that my daughter’s school will be near the ‘forest’ – I would be able to see it every day!

That’s a beauty of travel – the fun begins long before the trip itself. The anticipation accounts for half (if not more) of the fun of the experience itself.

Nowadays, I pass Bosco Verticale almost daily on my way to and from the university. I’ve seen it from all sides and admired its reflection in the glass wall of the UniCredit Tower (haven’t been inside, though.) I’ve seen it at night and during the day, up close and from the roof of my building, without a single leaf in the Winter, with blossoming cherry trees in the Spring and now in full green.

Although the initial excitement of seeing this fascinating piece of architecture is now lost (I suppose, due to a kind of hedonic adaptation), partly because of this incredible building, I am glad to be able to call this part of Milan home for these few months.

DSC03024

DSC09359_03-14-2017

DSC04291_01-20-2017

UniCredit Tower in Piazza Gae Aulenti. Milan. Italy.
UniCredit Tower in Piazza Gae Aulenti. Milan. Italy.
Posted on

Personal space

DSC05162_04-20-2017

I wouldn’t say it’s culture shock, but there is a noticeable difference between Italy and North America in terms of how people treat each other’s personal space: you have substantially less of it here in Europe. People stay closer to you, they wave their hands and sometimes touch you as they talk, they pat your child on the head as she walks past them on the street. To me personally, this has never reached the level of being uncomfortable. Just noticeable, that’s all. In fact, I’ve grown to kind of like it.

One detail that I notice about these mini-intrusions into each other’s personal spaces is that the fundamental motivation for it is to take some degree of personal responsibility about your and your family’s well-being. People notice what’s going on with others around them, and they genuinely care about it.

DSC07497_05-23-2017

Here is one example: our daughter rides a bicycle to and from school, while my wife and I walk behind her. We travel along a busy street with heavy traffic, and our daughter stops in front of every driveway and intersection to wait for us, so that we cross the street together. As she rides ahead on a sidewalk, people, who go in the opposite direction, stop and check if she stops safely an the intersection. They scan the street for her adult guardians and continue on their way only when they see and make eye contact with us (we are easily identifiable by a our daughter’s pink school backpack that we are carrying). This is not an isolated episode; it happens all the time.

Our daughter also regularly receives free sweets at patisseries and cafes (to her great delight) and pats on her head and cheeks from old ladies (to a much lesser delight).

It seems that respecting other people’s privacy and personal space comes secondary here to the notion that “it takes a village to raise a child”. As much as I’ve grown accustomed to being left alone most of the time, this feeling of being a part of the tribe is surprisingly comforting.

DSC05788_02-12-2017

Posted on

A flashback to colder months

DSC00943_04-08-2017

The weather in Milan has so rapidly changed from “jackets-and-pants” to “shorts-and-T-shirts” over the last couple of days, that it felt strange editing this video about a cold January weekend that we spent at the Children’s Museum, about which I wrote earlier in this post.

Posted on

Laughing out loud

DSC01141_04-09-2017

Recently, I heard about a psychology study that counted how often children laugh in a typical day (by the way, the study of laughter is called gelotology, apparently). The number is something around 300 times a day for a typical four-year-old. The striking thing is that the researchers found that an average forty-years-old adult laughs only about 4 times a day.

The hypothesis for explaining such a huge difference is that children acquire language skills at that age, and the English language (similar to most other languages, I suppose) has many expressions that are funny or absurd when taken literally (e.g. “to pick one’s brain”). The adults have heard these expressions so many times that they immediately perceive their implied meaning, without stopping to think, and to laugh at, the actual words.

DSC07033_05-02-2017

Here is an example supporting this theory. After leaving in Milan for a few months, we are starting to pick up a few Italian words, and I find myself if not laughing out loud then at least chuckling when my daughter cries “Mamma mia!” when I drop a piece of pizza on my lap.

So my personal extension of the theory is that going on sabbatical makes us younger by forcing us to be child-like when faced with new languages, custom and everyday situations. We just need to come back home when things stop being funny.

DSC07446_03-01-2017