While in Milan, I also bought a ticket to the cathedral and attached museum.
Of course outside of the neat framed shot, it actually looks like this: tourists and building work.
At this point I got very frustrated at the fact that my replacement phone hadn’t arrived before I travelled, and how much better the photos could have been if I wasn’t stuck using an old backup one or had brought my DSLR instead.
Again not so great exposure, but these stained glass windows are huge.
A descent into the crypt where the curse of the badly translated Italian museum captions strikes again. They never seem to get a native speaker or specialist in historical or heritage text to do them, and they’re always full of vocab mistakes even when the grammar is correct. For instance here the Italian word sepolcro was translated as “graveyard” rather than sepulchre or crypt. A pet hate of mine.
Most of the coins thrown into this pit seemed to be euros. A lack of international tourists for the past few years.
They also had these half-hearted recreations of the mosaics that were on the floor in Roman times.
The door handles had these carvings of crusaders (literally) stabbing each other in the back. I had to study the Gesta Francorum at university. It seemed to be never ending episodes of “this person kindly gave the crusaders accommodation until they stole all the roof leads/drank the entire cellar of wine/stole all the goats and the host got sick of them and threw them out”
Taking some busy time out of murder and plundering to pledge allegiance. I think it’s Barbarossa?
Next to the cathedral is a museum with various disused sculptures from the church. The displays were recently redone so the sculptures are dramatically lit up against dark backgrounds. What an incredible amount of money the medieval church had from the backs of the peasantry.
This mitre was one of the most interesting things- an early gift from Mexico to the pope, made with a traditional Aztec technique using cactus paper and feathers
Rejected gargoyles
Dad, dad…
