Sono arrivato Milano, The Duomo - Part 1

Duomo Milan Italy

I’ve decided it’s time to fly back into my European adventure. It was an amazing two week European trip that I never got to fully share with this wonderful world.

I last left off on my day trip to Amsterdam. And if I didn’t mention it before, I meant to book Amsterdam for longer than a day and have a bit of a shorter Italy trip. But the mix-up I made months prior really made Italy stand out to me.

My first stop in Italy was to Milan. I fortunately have family in Milan to stay with and give us a local guide through the fashion capital of the world.

After a night in eating some delicious Italian food and getting a wonderful place to sleep in. The next day was going to be filled with Milan sightseeing, all day.

My cousin was our guide for the day. Luckily she knew English and my Filipino language, Tagalog, on top of Italian. So she would be our translator for the day, as would I in case there was some English words she didn’t know, but knew in Tagalog.

This day my best friend, Issela and fellow sorority line sister was going to meet me in Milan. She was on a study abroad program in France and I hadn’t seen her in months. It so luckily coincided with my European trip, so of course I had to add in some best friend time.

She was technically supposed to meet up with us the night before, but due to some train delays and some train strikes on her traveling day. It took much longer to get to Milan than it was supposed to.

But eventually she was able to get on a train the next morning and we were to meet her in at the train station. Turns out the train station is much bigger than we anticipated and her phone had died and of course my phone would only work in Wifi areas. It was getting later and later in the day and we hadn’t found her yet.

Finally after circling around the station multiple times and trying to stay by certain exits we find each other and try to pack in the whole Milan in one day.

Our first stop was straight to the most famous attraction in Milan. The duomo. You can’t miss its beautiful structure outside, it is quite a beautiful place to see in person.

There are many churches in Milan, but this Duomo is just magnificent. It looks like a magical castle that you just want to live in.

On this day they had the entire front plaza covered with this white plastic and then random paint buckets and brushes all around. I’m not sure who had done this; it could be the city itself, the church, or just some random people, but it was fun to paint my initials on that white plastic. It was almost like painting my name into the plaza of the duomo to forever be there.

Me and my sorority sister painted our Sorority letters to forever be in Milan.

While I know it wasn’t going to be there forever, my photos of painting that ground will forever be ingrained in me. I even later found some paint stains on my rain jacket months later from that very moment.

While taking some photos on the outside, Alex got conned into feeding the birds. A guy basically forced a handful of bird seeds into his palm and all the birds came right to Alex. While it was a funny sight and some funny photos. He ended up having to pay a few Euros for that moment.

Making sure our shoulders were covered, luckily it was pretty chilly, so we were already covered up, we went inside. After of course, a quick bag check from the security guard in front of the door.

The inside was just as beautiful as the outside. You can rarely see a church as grandiose in your every day life (Well until I moved to Sioux Falls and their Catholic Church was almost European like).

We toured the inside and even went to the ‘quiet side’ where you aren’t able to take photos and must be quiet as you take in all the beauty that it has to offer you. I hear you can even walk up to the top of the Duomo, but since our day was already on a later schedule, we opted to move on.

After a final photo op on top of this sculpture stand outside that we ended up getting yelled at to get off of, we took in a final look at that beautiful Duomo and moved on to the rest of our tour of Milan.