Some days are just the getting there. The lake week was done, the bags were heavier with all the wrong things, and the plan was simple… train down to Milan, change, then east to the water city. Six hours of trains and a suitcase that had quietly decided it hated me.
Milan was meant to be a wave from the window. Somewhere out there was the Duomo, all pinnacles and stone lace. Somewhere was Santa Maria delle Grazie, where Leonardo’s Last Supper has been flaking gently on a wall since the 1490s. The Brera, La Scala, the Galleria with its glass dome. A whole city of art, one metro ride away, and I saw exactly none of it.
What I saw was the station. And reader, the station is enough.
Milano Centrale does not do humble. Ulisse Stacchini won the competition to build it back in 1912, then the design kept growing, grander and heavier, until it finally opened on the first of July 1931. Walk in off the platforms and the roof lifts away from you in these enormous iron and glass vaults, all ribs and light, like the inside of something that swallowed a cathedral. I stood in the middle of it with a camera up and a suitcase falling over, and just… looked.
The old animator in me went straight to work. All that repeating structure, the arches marching back into the haze, is a free lesson in how to draw depth without drawing every rivet. You let the shapes get smaller and paler and the eye happily does the rest. I could have stayed an hour. I had about eleven minutes.
Up at the end of the hall, three huge arched windows pour the morning straight in, and the whole crowd underneath goes to silhouette. Trolleys, travellers, a boy with a backpack bigger than he is. Movement is the thing I came all this way to chase, and here it was for free, in a place most people cross at a run with their eyes glued to the departures board.
Then the board changed, my platform number came up, and I ran too. By evening I was on the mainland edge of Venice, unpacking in a quiet flat over in Mestre, feet up, the good kind of tired. Tomorrow the alarm goes off in the dark and I go looking for the city everyone warned me about. But today the job was just to move, and to notice, and Milan handed me a cathedral I never asked for. Onward.
My last Venice morning, and the famous rooftop everyone climbs for the view has been shut for a year. No matter. I had the Rialto at dawn, an empty St Mark’s, and then the rain turned every lane into a mirror.
The list said Murano, glass factories, back streets. My legs said something else entirely. So I stayed on the mainland with the actual Venetians and drew all day instead.
Before Redentore’s fireworks fill Venice, an artist walks the empty Grand Canal and Castello’s quiet campos at dawn, sketching a rowing boatman, a hidden Baroque church, and a dog asleep in a moored boat.
