Wedding Blog

Since Mrs. Canary wants to kick off the new year off right and in serious need of some travel inspiration to ward off the back-to-work blues, she’s going to let Mr. Canary drive for a bit and tell you about the most amazing trip before diving back into wedding recaps.

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One of the vistas from our bike ride through Tuscany. That is no Photoshop. Just the real deal!

It wouldn’t be everyone’s idea of a honeymoon, and Mrs. Canary and I definitely gave due course to beach vacations, exotic bungalows and fluorescent-colored, little umbrella-bedecked drinks, too. But for us, two weeks in Italy was perfect: a wild, enriching, enveloping adventure. We had only 12 days (plus two spent largely in transit), but it felt four times as long, and in three sections—three days in urban holds like Milan and Bologna to start, five days of a prearranged bike tour through the hill towns and off-the-track gems throughout Tuscany, and finally a three-day respite in Siena before a return to Milan—we felt like we really made the best of our time.

What magic overall.

One of those trips whose small moments you remember far longer than even the framework of your itinerary. Mrs. Canary and I both took notes, absorbed, and tried to document our adventure in hopes of preserving its memories even further past the hundreds and hundreds of photos and souvenirs we brought home.

Days 1 & 2: Milan

The Duomo, decorated with scaffolding.

We began in Milan, a city that didn’t reveal its charms until our second day, thanks to a long, overnight flight and commensurate jet lag, and the amusing, day-one medley of me realizing I’d managed to lose one of our best guidebooks and break our first night’s hotel key within a span of 30 minutes. While they became howled-over jokes not a day later, it was clear at the time we needed a nap. (And then a drink. Or three.)

Zabaione, heaven in a bowl

Having groggily ventured into the city that afternoon, we didn’t get much out of nondescript streets or a quick visit to the Duomo. But what we both did remember most from the first 24 hours, however, was our first meal. It was lunch at a classy spot called Trattoria Milanese, not far from the main downtown area, that included what turned out to be the best dessert we ate on our entire trip (and yes, here is where I give Mrs. Canary full credit for insisting we order, tired and ready to leave as I was). The dessert was zabaione, a traditional northern Italian dessert that in oversimplified terms is, as I described it to a pair of salivating Texans on a train trip out of Florence two weeks later, “pudding laced with liquor”. Pure genius.

Castello Sforzesco, Milan

We did a lot better the next morning when we spent hours wandering around castles and medieval museums. Breakfast was plentiful—heaping plates of hams and cheeses, frothy macchiatos and European-style yogurt—and we found a lot more of the city to enjoy, walking along some less commercial streets, finding a few good bargains in some clothing stores as well as building in time to gawk at the absurd higher-end stuff, and overcoming the jetlag. Lunch was a well-apportioned football of mozzarella—along with prosciutto and other savories—at a bar called Obika, which we discovered by accident after reading about the chain—and it’s upcoming New York franchise—in the New York Times on the plane the previous day and then losing the address along with the guidebook later that day. Fate wanted us to get to that mozzarella bar. Fate is not lactose intolerant.

Santa Maria Della Grazie, Milan

The lingering “event” from the first Milan portion of our trip was our last activity before heading to our Bologna train: a visit with Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”, which remains at Santa Maria delle Grazie not far from the city center, having miraculously survived humidity (it isn’t a fresco), wartime bombing, and more than 15 restorations over the centuries. The keepers of the exhibit—manicured old ladies who tell the story of the painting with detail and drama, and probably know it better than the names and ages of their grandchildren—direct visitors by appointment through a series of three electronic doors. Once you enter through one set, that set has to close behind you before the next one opens, thereby preserving the climate of the main hall where the painting is housed. The air is tightly measured—the lack of it in the main room makes people a bit lightheaded—and the flooring is equipped with bristles to remove dust from shoes as you walk through.

“The Last Supper” itself, despite even its reputation, recognizability and deterioration, is a showstopper. I hadn’t been so moved by seeing a single work of art since visiting “Guernica” in Spain six years earlier, and Mrs. Canary, whose art history credentials are well in order, was able to fill in the gaps—and fix some of the fact fudging!—left by our tour guide. Any art history book or internet image search can bring up with the painting itself looks like, but what you get from seeing it live in the flesh is the perspective: being able to look at the wall that contains “The Last Supper” from different depths—right up front, from the center of the hall, and from the far end—and experiencing something close to what it must have looked like—its perfect proportions, its luminosity—to its original viewers, who viewed it mostly likely while dining and seated from within the hall.

Days 2-3: Bologna

The Towers of Bologna

If Milan was a cosmopolitan nexus, buttoned up and mildly snooty with definite charms, good deals among the glittering boutiques and delicious food, Bologna was a fun, hectic, hair-down, student-filled sort of place, and we knew it the second we lugged our bags off the train and trudged through most of the town to get to our hotel after being told it was “close by”. Our first look at Bologna reminded Mrs. Canary a bit of her college summer semester in Padova, though it was clear Bologna is significantly livelier (and less urbane), with a glut of crowded cafes and gelaterias, hopping town squares filled with packs of people our age and younger, and plenty of street music and good cheer. A sharp and exciting place, as it’s probably been since its days as a hub of student activity and government protest. (See, we should totally write a guidebook.)

Granted, when we arrived, were already riled up; we made the same mistake as another American couple on the Milan-to-Bologna train in that we’d arrived early enough to sit comfortably—in the wrong section of the train. Grabbing our bags, it was also made clear that the correct section was all the way at the other end of the train and it would be leaving the station inside of five minutes. So we snagged our bags—new year’s resolution, especially for Mr. Canary: remember how to pack lighter and practice doing so—and sprinted down to the other end of the track, finally flopping down next to a pair of dry, gimlet-eyed passengers, who couldn’t disguise their amusement that we were sweating and keyed up. I looked at Mrs. Canary as soon as the train pulled away and laughed. She was already laughing at me.

Our luxurious digs in Bologna.

The fun would only continue from there: we arrived at a genteel-looking hotel, only to be told by a nervous front desk manager that because of a “booking mistake” or “hotel maintenance” or whatever rehearsed spiel he’d decided to feed people, we’d have to stay at another hotel down the street that had a “shared relationship” and was “just as good.” What it was, was a far more modest pensione whose elderly operators told us in no uncertain terms it would to tuck us in a way back room—and it was hardly their fault—overlooking a noisy restaurant’s patio area, with no corner of the room sans cobwebs, a bed that was probably five years past its replacement-need window, and a certain spottedness on the toilets and in the shower. “This place is kind of a crack den,” sighed the bride. “Aye,” growled the groom.

The arcades of Bologna

As in Milan, though, it wasn’t hard to get the buzz back: some stern negotiations with the original hotel to get us back in for the following day at a discount—and a few coppettas of gelato—later, we grabbed a decent dinner at a guide-recommended trattoria near the main town square, and decided to pick up again the next day after a leisurely walk back.

The cafes of the Central Square

Our favorite drink of the trip, the latte macchiato.

It was on Day 3, our first full day in Bologna and third in Italy, that we finally relaxed and let the trip take over. After a long day of good shopping and sites—Bologna has a wealth of modest, underrated museums, including one devoted to local-born artist Giorgio Morandi, and plenty of eye candy—plus Mrs. Canary’s eagle eye leading us to the less-obvious spot where the locals get their gelato, we went to dinner at Drogheria della Rossa, a unique osteria installed in the former location of a drug store. We were fine to let the chef/owner, who visited every table in the place, tell us what we would be served instead of order from a menu.

Mrs. Canary delicious steak dinner.

Two and a half hours later, full of steak, tagliatelle, mascarpone and skinfuls of sangiovese, we took the long way back to the hotel, passing through a street festival—a local band closed its set with “Gloria” that had hordes of drunk students rocking out—and a row of pubs and shops that had decided to stay open late. We ditched plans to go to a famous Bologna jazz club and stumbled gigglingly back to the hotel (though not without our third gelato of the day, natch).

Content we’d made the best of some stumbling blocks and gotten the most out of two Italian cities we hadn’t seen before, we packed up the next morning and decamped for Arezzo, the starting point of a five-day bike tour…

To be continued… the best is yet to come!

* All photos taken by Mrs. Canary