In the old days, a handy trick I learned was to just find the cheapest direct flight from Europe to wherever I wanted to go,¹ book it, then take a train or a bus or a flight within Europe for a few days earlier, and I’d get to explore a new city. That’s trickier now, post-COVID, where crossing any sort of border might run you into problems. And it turns out I’d have been much happier getting a “fit to fly” certificate last Thursday then flying directly to the United States Sunday night. I could have relaxed over the weekend rather than worrying about it.

But I didn’t know that when I booked everything, so I ended up spending a couple days in Italy. And that’s the other problem, where you fly into a city for a quick stopover and discover you’ve got 48 hours and you’re gonna need a week. And so it is with Milan. I needed a week.

It wasn’t just that I one of the biggest things on my list — The Last Supper — requires booking three months in advance.² With longer in town I might have been able to score a tour or canceled ticket. But Milan — like most of Italy — is crammed with amazing architecture and restaurants and museums. And I basically had from dusk to dawn to see all of it.

I failed, obviously. I walked for five hours straight, first at 8am to The Last Supper to inquire about last-minute day-of tickets,³ then to the Duomo and then to lunch and then to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, and then to the Leonardo Museum and then it was 2pm and I just wanted to crash for the afternoon.

In the evening I was poking around and discovered, completely by accident, that the oldest Michelin-starred vegetarian restaurant was in Milan.⁴ I had been frustrated by the lack of vegetarian options at most of the places I checked⁵ and it was near my hotel and they had availability, so I booked sight unseen.

So my last night in Milan I ended up with a ten course tasting menu where each dish was better than the last. I really just wanted a small local tratorria, I swear, but when one of the best vegetarian restaurants in the world drops into your lap, I’m not dumb enough to pass it up.

So I’ll need to come back, and tour the castle and a couple dozen other museums and hit up a few tratorrias and churches and finally book that Last Supper ticket I missed out on. And it’ll be fine. There’s still a lot to see in Northern Italy anyway.

Right now I’m on a flight to the United States — whole lot of other emotions about that, obviously — and I’ll be starting in New York with a full schedule of restaurants and museums and people to catch up with over the very short week I’ll be there. And that’ll be fine too. Life is full of half-measures, things unfinished, weekends you wish were weeks and weeks you wish were months and months that could have been the rest of your life. If there’s a consolation, it’s that there’s always a new experience around the corner. And you’ll know better the next time.

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Footnotes

¹ FlightList is good for that.

² Italians never really struck me as a “book stuff three months in advance” kind of people so it was kind of a shock to discover that. And there are certain workarounds, mostly involving booking tours with guides that include a stop there. But with everything I had going on I didn’t have time to really think about what and where I was going to be in a month or a week, and the last-minute tour I booked canceled the day before and everything else was sold out.

As someone who runs larp signups, this is something I think about a lot. Lots of big larps put tickets on sale a year or more in advance and, if you know about it and can plan that far in advance, it’s great. If you don’t or can’t, you’re screwed hoping for someone to drop out. And I know a lot of people who can plan three or six months in advance at best.

I’m more sympathetic to the problem with larps or theater tickets, since many of those kind of things have trouble judging interest, struggle to get sign ups in the first place, and need the money up front to run. Reserving blocks of tickets to be released closer to the date is a problem.

Somehow I don’t think The Last Supper falls into any of those categories, and holding back a handful of tickets to be released the day of for last minute interest doesn’t seem like a huge inconvenience. But I don’t operate museums.

³ A long shot, but doable in principle. One of the snottiest people I’ve ever seen working in customer service told me to fuck off. Off I fucked.

⁴ Opened in 1997!

⁵ Or maybe I just thought I was, with my limited Italian