All My Bags are Packed, I’m Ready to Go to Milan, Vincenza and Rome. Then Maybe We’ll Think About That Jet Plane Back to the States

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?

Florence Has an Outlet Mall, But It Doesn’t Want You to Find It

I always find it so interesting when stores don’t want you to know they exist.  Andrew once told me to meet him at Thom Browne‘s store in New York and I spent twenty minutes walking around aimlessly looking for it before realizing that it was an unmarked store with blinds covering every window and door!  While not as secretive as Thom Browne, the Mall outside of Florence reminded me of this experience because of how difficult it was to reach.

Before I get to the day, can we talk about how I cannot believe that no one else was bright enough to just name their mall simply the Mall.  That is genius!  Anyway, Sydney and I left on an 8h0 bus from Siena to Florence this past Sunday.  Usually, there are a few buses directly to this designer-only outlet mall that leave throughout the day, but because it was Sunday, there are only two buses that run at the absolute worst times (9h0 and then 15h0).  So we instead took a train to Rignano Sull’Arno, the nearest train station according to the Mall’s website, and expected to be greeted by the readily available taxis that the site promised would be there.  We walked around for about ten minutes before an unmarked taxi at the station charged us 10€ to share a taxi with two other people!  It was highway robbery, regardless of how you look at it.

And so, we arrived at what has to be the busiest field in all of Tuscany.  I say this because you’re basically surrounded by fields on all sides of this outlet mall.  So let me describe the brilliance behind this place.  They schlep you out here to the middle of boon-fuck nowhere and because of all the time and money you spent to get here, they know you’re not leaving empty-handed, hence the only stores are actual designer stores, all twenty of them.  Then, they know you’ll be hungry eventually so they know they can get away with charging 4,50€ for a panino, which is outrageous no matter how much disposable income you have to spend.  So really, it’s got to be the most well-concieved outlet mall on earth.

The layout of the Mall is also unique.  They know that Asians are their target customers so there is clearly a nod to this architecturally.  It seems to remind me of Japanese homes before Western influence.  The ones that required you to walk over little bridges or rocks to reach.  Instead of water, the Mall uses grass, rocks, water features with koy fish swimming around and lots of bamboo.

The stores themselves are clustered into the four most random groups.  Armani Jeans, Dior, Pucci, and Burberry’s (that what it was called before hell froze over) make up cluster one.  Then it’s Marni, Fendi, Alexander McQueen/Stella McCartney, the Italian children’s boutique Pinco Pallino, and Tod’s/Hogan (heaven?) in cluster two.  Cluster three has Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Loro Piana, Sergio Rossi, and Giorgio Armani (which one would think would be located somewhere near the Armani Jeans).  Cluster Four is Roberto Cavalli, Valentino, Bottega Veneta, Zegna, Balenciaga, and Ferragamo.

All of the eating options are located in large, two story building filled with large seating areas in black leather, more bamboo and three dining options.  You can opt for either the Dot Com restaurant on the second floor in you feel okay knowing that someone is probably getting the pair of shoes you looked at and decided to think about over your very leisurely lunch.  Downstairs is where you’ll find the Café and the Bar, which appear to be one-in-the-same, but are considered two separate options.  The Café, where we ate, has good enough food, which I wasn’t expecting since it’s not like there’s another place nearby that can encourage them to make the food good.  I mean, if you’re hungry, you frankly don’t care what you eat and they know this and can therefore charge over 8 € for a salad!  I had a panino with eggplant, proscuito crudo and some cheese, which was quite good, but a bit spicy for me (I can’t even tolerate a tiny amount of heat in my food, hence I hate Indian and Mexican food).  There was also a Lindt “outlet” store, which we descended upon like the Allied Forces on D-Day: by surprise and with force!  As expected, there were types of chocolate there that are not available back in the States, so of course we stocked up!  I got champagne-filled milk chocolate, which I haven’t eaten just yet.

So in terms of deals, they were few and far between.  Yes, the merchandise is 60-70% off retail, but that’s when retail starts at 2,000€.  Also, while I’m usually able to walk into an outlet (or even a regular store with a big holiday sale) and pick something worth buying out of the hideous, “It deserves to be in a bargain bin at a county fair in Idaho” items, it took some serious digging this time.  Don’t get me wrong, there are things to buy, it just depend on how much money you have left after you convert Dollars to Euros (1€ is currently $1.45).

I ended up with the oddest mismatch of items.  a very fitted shirt at Valentino that was practically on clearance and bought as a way to remind myself that I can’t gain any weight, something for mother and then instead of getting one of the four pairs of Tod’s I liked, I ended up with cleaning supplies to save my current pair from death and to protect my new suede ones from Paris.  I didn’t buy a pair of shoes because when Mother called to see if there was anything for her, I instead told her that I was contemplating a pair of either navy leather or navy suede Tod’s (I didn’t bother mentioning the burgundy or the dark green suede pairs).  Well, apparently, men shouldn’t wear shoes that aren’t black, brown, light brown, or other neutral colors.  Someone should tell probably 75% of the men who buy Tod’s shoes, because the colors were flying off the shelves.  In fact, she admitted that she was glad that at least the highly inappropriate College shoes Grace bought me for Hanukkah from Stubbs and Wootton are black!  I figure that if she’d rather see me wear those in public instead of burgundy suede Tod’s, then I’m buying the Tod’s just so she agrees to be seen with me in a pair of shoes that actually says “Screw You” on them!

Fortunately, the bus arrived and took us back to Florence so we could get the bus to Siena.  Now, would I recommend going to this place if it weren’t so damn difficult to reach!  For that reason alone, don’t waste your time and instead put the money toward one nice thing at one of the twenty outlets’s retail stores.

Until next time…

-JD

PS: Happy Passover to everyone, or as the Italians call it, “The Jewish Easter.”  I don’t know where they came up with that one because it makes absolutely no sense!  My Italian roommate also doesn’t quite seem to get that I can’t eat bread or anything with yeast in it, even though I explained the reasoning to him more than once.  Oh well, I’ll be 5lbs lighter on Monday and able to eat a big bowl of pasta then.  Plus, my pants will fit me again!