Milan, City Centre and Cathedral. 18th September 2015

We spent the day looking around the centre of the city, including a quick visit to the Cathedral.

 Milan had a large canal system, built to enable goods to reach the city. Leonardo da Vinci invented the "mitre" lock gate, still used all over the world today, to make opening the gates much easier. These gates In Milan were his.

 The company Eataly has a large number of very good food supermarkets and restaurants all over Italy. This is their branch in the centre of Milan. They had some sort of promotion with Fiat which included dressing up a Fiat 500 with fruit & vegetables.

The bread section is full of the most delicious looking bread. 

The Porta Nuova district of Milan is the business district and has some stunning new buildings. 

We had lunch in the cafe at Trussardi which is just round the corner from La Scala but hardly a tourist in sight. The food was excellent & I couldn't resist a shot of our plates - Gill had a risotto with saffron & I had a gaspacio.

The floor in the Cathedral - quite magnificent.

An HDR view of the inside of the cathedral. It is from just two frames, with extreme differences in the lighting, I am hugely impressed with the resulting HDR image I obtained from Lightroom.

A walk around the roof is not to be missed, the views of the city are excellent as is the close up you see of the cathedral itself.

The view of part of the skyline from the roof.

The old trams have a real old world charm with their wooden seats & floors and the glass lamp shades.

One of the shop windows in Via Spiga, one of the two very upmarket shopping streets.

Before returning to our hotel, we looked to see if the bowling green was being used, and luckily it was. We could just see a small part of it from our room. It is a bowling green with artificial grass and is part of a cafe/restaurant - you can see customers watching while having a drink.
The bowls are very different to any I have seen before in that you bowl diagonally across the green - with two ridges the balls have to cross on their way!