This year’s city break was my first visit to Italy. The weather wasn’t particularly kind, this trip being in October, but thankfully the one nice day was the one when we came over frightfully touristy and took a guided walking tour around the city centre, which is where almost all of these photos will be from.
There’s something so distinctive about Italian streets. I was constantly snapping quick shots down alleyways that I’d half expect to see on the wall of Caffè Nero.
The outside of the Teatro alla Scala was covered in scaffolding but the inside was just beautiful. Thankfully not as squeamish about allowing photos of the stage under construction as Sydney Opera House was!
The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II is absurdly beautiful for a shopping arcade. The appeal of shopping there is sadly lost on me, but just look at it.
Milan Cathedral is something else. An ideal chance to experiment with exposure bracketing and HDR merges.
8-bit JPEGs really can’t do those windows justice, which seems a shame when most of my devices have HDR-capable screens, which has had me experimenting with Lightroom’s HDR capabilities and the feasibility of more modern formats. It’s a minefield of compatibility problems, but JPEG XL seems promising.
The last stop of the day was Santa Maria delle Grazie, the home of Da Vinci’s Last Supper.
That’s a truly incredible painting – a mural, really – to see. It’s limited to a couple dozen people at a time so you won’t get the sea of tourists holding up phones like you would at, say, the Louvre, and you get 15 minutes in there with it. An amazing showcase of perspective and geometry.
A word of advice, though: it sells out a couple of weeks in advance, so don’t leave booking tickets until the day before you go like we did. The tour was good, but we probably wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t the only available way to get tickets to this!
From one cathedral to the more secular kind, on our last day I also couldn’t miss the chance to see the San Siro.
The rain was tipping down and there wasn’t time for me to take the tour, but I can at least say I’ve seen it, which may not be possible for much longer. There are some absurdly slick modern stadiums around these days, but I’m yet to find one with the personality of this generation.
