That’s right, by the time this posts itself, I will be on a Eurostar headed north to meet Mother in Milano and officially on summer vacation! While I won’t really have time to “reflect”on my time here in Siena until next Thursday on my nine hour, forty minute flight back to New York (okay fine, Newark) from Rome, I did genuinely enjoy my time here in Tuscany. Siena is a very beautiful city that y’all should spend more than the two hours it seems that most tourists spend here. I’ll save my overall “reflection” of my semester here in Siena for two weeks from now, after I’ve had a chance to actually see my own home and reflect properly on my time here.
This week is going to be quite insane. I’m heading to Milan today to meet mother and tomorrow, I managed to get us tickets to see Leonardo’s Last Supper, which was not easy at all. In fact, it was as if they don’t want me to visit , but as if that stopped me. I called that damn number every two minutes nonstop for three straight hours! Then our concierge at our hotel in Milan, the Hotel Principe di Savoia, told me how to get them because they’re apparently not allowed or something stupid like that. Whatever, I got them and I got a student discount which is how I’m sticking it to the Italians for putting me through all the trouble of getting the damn tickets. Apparently, they sell the majority of the tickets to tour guides who include the Last Supper in their waste of time tour, but your best bet is to check on Mondays because that’s when they show openings from people canceling, which is how I found my two tickets.
As a special treat, though, Friday night is about the opera. Mother has wanted to go to see an opera at La Scala for years and lucky for us, Friday night is the final performance of Puccini’s Turandot and we got tickets! This is actually going to be pretty amazing simply because it’s La Scala and if y’all need any help in knowing what it is, let me put in a basic of a way as possible: if you’re an opera singer and you perform at La Scala, you can basically die the next day having lived a complete life. There is no greater honor than to perform in La Scala and once you’ve done that you really can’t do anything else that can top it, unless you marry Prince Harry, in which case, yeah, you can.
On Saturday, we’re visiting Vincenza, a city known for one big thing: Bottega Veneta‘s factory and headquarters are both located there (as is a factory outlet). And she didn’t think I know that! Please, I remember her going on and on about how she wanted to go to Vincenza for Bottega Veneta when we were in Italy in 2007. I’m okay with this because the black wallet I want is from Bottega and as much as I love it, I’d rather put that 210€ toward the Allegri safari jacket I plan/hope to get in either Milan or Rome. Maybe she’ll remember me talking about how unique the wallet was (it’s black, but there’s a lot of hunter green mixed in and it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before and I’m trying to move away from my longtime staple color of blue and I’ve gone to green and I just love the contrast of the colors) and take care of a birthday present now, and you can never start too early with those hints! Please, I start dropping hints about birthday presents for next year the day after my birthday!
From Vincenza, where I imagine I won’t see anything besides Bottega, which is fine because Italian fashion is kind of like a national treasure, we’re moving down south to Siena for the night on Sunday so Mother can see where I’ve been living these past few months.
Finally, we’re spending the last few days of our time in Rome. I’m so excited because we honestly have nothing planned and we’ll just see what happens. However, next Thursday, when they open that cabin door in Newark, it’s off to Manhattan because I’ll be arriving just in time for Andrew’s twenty-first birthday! I am SO excited for this because well, Andrew’s turning twenty-one and I don’t think this requires any further explanation. I just have to figure out if I’ll have enough time to pick up his present before dinner or if it’ll just have to be shipped. I’ll figure it out.
Well, that’s all for now and until next time from back in the States (or Colonies, if you’re English)…
-JD
PS: If I pull a muscle or miss a train during this week, it’s going to because I’ll be traveling with someone who absolutely refuses to touch a suitcase (and we’ll have four very heavy suitcases) because of completely phony injuries. I know that a man should always carry the bags, but um… two of our bags are the largest size bags that can be checked so where should the other two bags go?
The Yapper 