Green Park

 

I never want to hear Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" again.  No, I'll rephrase that: I don't need to hear Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" again.  I'm done.  I've heard every single variation on it, every version, a different chord arrangement, done fast, done slow; I've heard it.  I don't need to hear it again.  And I certainly don't need to hear it played on an acoustic guitar on a train in Italy at nine in the morning.  

(Here are some other songs I do not ever need to hear again: Robbie Williams' "Angels", Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline", literally anything by Billy Joel.  I know you're probably adding "Don't Look Back In Anger" to that list but I have a very fond memory of spontaneously singing that with a coach of students in 1995 as we headed back from a night out at Manhattan's, Southport, and so I can never really hate it).

The point is I was not in the mood for a metro busker, though, if I'm honest, I never am.  She strolled up and down the train, warbling "Hallelujah", trying to catch our eye so we'd be guilted into handing over a couple of coins.  Trapping someone on a train - on a train that is an going a relatively long way without stopping at a station to let you escape - and forcing them to hear Leonard Cohen is surely a violation of the Geneva Convention.  What was worse was I wasn't even getting off at the next station: that was Famagosta, which I'd already collected.  I gritted my teeth and wished I had my headphones until we finally reached Romolo station.

The streets around the station were still in rush hour mode, the bus exchange disgorging commuters, the traffic carrying the slight anxiety of drivers who were that little bit behind time.  The pedestrian crossing held the cars and I could feel their tension, the revving of engines as I walked by, the need to move on.

A thin boulevard of shops and then I was in a park again.  Paths wound beneath trees and alongside grass that still hadn't turned yellow from the sun.  New apartments had been slotted in alongside, built on top of industrial units.

I crossed another road and was then in a different park, this one named, somewhat, incongruously, for Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout Movement.  I was a cub and a scout until my early teens - not especially because I wanted to, mainly because my parents thought if I didn't have some kind of enforced social activity I'd have spent my entire childhood in my room alone reading (and they were right) - so I did a little three fingered salute to the man who started it all.  I wasn't a very good Scout, but I ended up a patrol leader because after a certain point every boy of a certain age became a patrol leader; I still have trouble with a reef knot, I've never been able to do that one where the rabbit goes round the tree and in his hole, and anything more complicated than that is basically an Indian rope trick to me.  

There was a tree near the exit to the park, and someone had hung a small white circle of paper on it, like a Christmas tree covered in wishes in a shopping centre.  On it was written E ALLORA Ti TENGO LE MANi SULLE ORECCHiE E ALLONTANiAMO i RUMORi DEL MONDE - "AND THEN I HOLD MY HANDS ON YOUR EARS AND WE MOVE AWAY THE NOISES OF THE WORLD".  I'm not sure what that means, or why it's all caps except for the "i", but it's a sweet sentiment.

The park emptied me out onto another canalside.  Porto Genova was a district of workshops and factories but, like other areas of its type in cities across the world, in recent years it's been colonised by bars and clubs and transformed into a fashionable district for young people to hang out in.  

At this time of the morning it was recovering from the night before.  The pavement was being hosed down, the seats were being set out, the shutters remained tightly fixed on every third establishment.  Small hole in the wall places had opened to dispense pastries and coffee to passers by but it was an area still yawning.

Why don't we have more vending machines in the UK?  The rest of the world loves them, and they're convenient and always available.  In Britain you usually find them inside a store, which kind of renders them pointless; if a store is open you don't need a machine.  Of course we'd never have tobacco dispensers on street corners - won't somebody think of the children - but it'd be nice to know at three in the morning that you could still get a packet of Wotsits and a bottle of Coke Zero if the mood took you.

I crossed the Navigli Grande via an iron bridge, named the Ponte Enrico Molteni after the bassist for the band Tre Allegri Ragazzi Morti.  He lives nearby and this was seen as a fitting tribute to him; he's not dead, though, which always worries me.  Naming anything after someone who's still alive - unless they're a king or a president - runs the risk of them doing something dodgy in later life which will result in a hasty rebrand.  Wait until they're dead - in fact, give it five years to be sure - and then slap the nameplate on it.  (I should add, for legal reasons, that to my knowledge Ragazzi Morti is a model citizen and the renaming of the bridge is a worthy tribute to a gentleman and hero.  His music's not bad, either - sort of like mid-90s American indie, the stuff they did after Grunge while we were all in on Britpop).  

I do think that, if Enrico lives nearby, he should nip round with a bolt cutter and get rid of all the padlocks that have been attached to the railings on his bridge.  Can we stop this?  It's not original and it's not romantic and it's plain annoying.  I'm sick of going to scenic bridges and seafronts and seeing a mess of cheap Yales with Debbie and Garry scrawled on it in permanent marker.  They won't be there forever, because the council has to come round every few months to cut them down or the fence will collapse.  Bury a time capsule or something instead, you basics.

Incidentally, look at how clear that water is!  It certainly puts the Leeds and Liverpool to shame.  Not a single shopping trolley or bloated corpse to be seen.  The local gangsters couldn't chuck a "shooter" in there to dispose of the evidence, everyone would see it.

The Via Casale takes you away from the canal, back into the city.  It was more touristy here, with restaurant menus in multiple languages.  There were clusters of young travellers wheeling their suitcases over the cobbles, kicked out of their Air B&Bs, looking for some breakfast.

At the top is the Piazzale Stazione Genova, home to the Porto Genova railway station... or at least the building.  Milan is in the process of rationalising its rail network, creating larger more modern hubs and redirecting tracks and services in the process.  Part of this rationalisation meant that the services that previously went to Porto Genova were redirected to the much larger Rogoredo station; the opening of the M4 line meant that people in the area could access them via the Metro with a couple of changes.

The station closed in December last year and as yet there doesn't seem to be a plan for what to do with it.  The booking hall is still open, though the ticket office is closed, as is the access to the platforms; there doesn't seem to be a reason for it, unless Italian railways are determined to provide access to Photo-Me booths.  Even the KFC which occupies the café space has closed its door into the station building.

I returned to the piazza outside to get to the Metro station, a set of stairs descending beneath the ground with an arched roof to deflect the sun.

The Milan Metro is definitely showing its age.  (Aren't we all?)  A lot of the paint is peeling, there are water stains, and the concrete is chipped.  This does create opportunities for street art, however - see?

When life gives you lemons, turn them into a seated gorilla having a chat with Audrey II.

Sant' Agostino station is one of the deepest on the entire system, constructed to try and cause as little disruption to the buildings above as possible.  As such it's a rare Milan Metro station with two tubes carrying the tracks, one on top of the other, meaning a network of escalators and stairs to take you to the mezzanine.  (Isn't the graffiti on the train in the picture above wonderful, by the way?  A charming addition to the boring livery, and definitely not incredibly irritating vandalism that reduces the quality of life of everyone who sees it).

S. Agostino station is not to be confused with S. Ambrosio station, which is one stop further on on the M2.  I feel like they could've put a little more thought into the station names there, so that there weren't two stops with the same name five hundred metres apart.  Still, at least they're close, so if you do get off at the wrong one it's not much of a walk.

There's an extensive plaza on top of the station, though it's pretty featureless and is no doubt mainly used for gatherings of revellers and diners.  (In fact, look at it on Google Streetview and it's like a war zone as the binmen clear up after some kind of public protest/celebration).  The presence of two "British" pubs, the Old Fox and the Nelson, made me wonder what state the square had been in the night before.  It was the morning after England beat Mexico to get to the quarter finals of the World Cup, and I imagined it had been a scene of debauched indulgence and exultance.  I was impressed that Milan's street cleaners had managed to tidy it up so quickly.

However, the Old Fox's Facebook page doesn't mention the World Cup at all, even though there were events for St George's Day and they boast of the best Fish and Chips in town.  I wondered if they'd politely decided not to rub England's success in the faces of their Italian neighbours, a bit like when I picked up my GCSE results with my friends Mandy and Laura and had to keep quiet about my As because they were sobbing over how many they'd failed and all the resits they were going to have to do.  

The Via Olona takes you past Milan's science museum, naturally named after Leonardo di Vinci, and home to the city's railway museum.  A pavilion houses a lot of old engines which I'm sure are fascinating if you like that sort of thing but, as we've established, I don't.  I did consider going for a look round if I managed to finish the Metro early, but I didn't, and besides, I'm not sure any transport museum can compete with Stockholm's Spårvägsmuseet.  It remains the gold standard, as far as I'm concerned, mainly because it used the transport to tell the story of the city and its people, and didn't simply stick a massive steam train in front of you and expect you to coo over its bogies.

S. Ambrogio - yes, I did check to make sure I was writing about the correct station - was given a major uplift when it was chosen to be the interchange with the M4 line.  

It's not immediately obvious that there are two lines here, however.  The ticket hall remains in the standard M2 style, not upgraded in any way.  The only way you'll find the M4 is following the signs down below.

Another four stations under my belt.  I was going to carry on writing about more on the line, but I think we all need a break, don't you?  And perhaps a lie down.  Come back another time for Lanza and beyond.  We can get through this together.

Green Land

 

It's weird how hotel breakfasts cause you to eat the most random of foods.  I started my travels round the M2 full of a combination of cocktail sausages, frittata, and fried peppers, a combination that I wouldn't eat under any circumstances back in the UK.  Somehow if you put it in a breakfast buffet I work my way along the row of cloches and shove a heap of everything on my plate.  (Although I did draw the line on the Thursday when I opened one up and found peas underneath.  Peas are not a breakfast food).

The point is I was absolutely stuffed when I arrived at Piazzale Abbiategrasso station.  I'd need the energy.  The M2 is even longer than the M1, so long that I'd already planned on leaving one of its branches - the one to Gessate - until the next day.  I'd need to really push myself if I was going to complete my objectives.

I headed south on the first train that I saw, unbothered about which terminus I ended up at; I was going to have to do the other one anyway.  The Abbiategrasso train came first so they "won".

Yes I do look knackered.

It's a funny little stub of a branch, only having a single stop, mainly there to tie into the two tram routes that end here.  I crossed over the road and onto a wide patch of grass, and from there into the Parco Chiesa Rossa.  

I felt good and raring to go.  Finishing off the M1 the day before had been the right thing to do, even if it left me crawling into my bed.  I felt like Milan was absolutely within my bony fingers.  And if it could just stay nice and cool, as it was right then at eight in the morning, that would be much appreciated too.

The shade was welcome for me and for the other joggers and walkers using the park at that time of the morning.  There were already some old people taking up space on the benches, getting in their constitutionals, and a man filling his water bottles at the council fountain.

The Naviglio Pavese is one of Milan's few remaining canals, a connection from the city to the southern town of Pavia.  There used to be a whole network of waterways all over the region carrying boats and working as irrigation tools, all feeding into a circular route around Milan's medieval centre that acted as a kind of massive roundabout for boats.  It was built over and turned into a road in the twenties, as were most of the other canals.

Today the main remainders are in the south west of the region, though they're no longer used as canals.  There have been proposals to reactivate them as leisure facilities; indeed, now and then politicians promise to open up the culverts they're hidden in and restore them as open waterways.  Nothing's happened so far.

Crossing the river I ended up in a knot of residential towers and buildings.  As I walked towards my next station, Famagosta, I began to slowly acquire fellow travellers, like the Pied Piper.  They were all dressed far more sensibly than me, off to serious jobs in Milan, lugging laptop bags and wearing ties.  (Why are people still wearing ties in 2026?  Throw them away!)

Famagosta is another fantastic interchange; multi-storey car park, bus terminal and metro station, all right next door to a motorway junction.  Park and ride seems so easy here.  There doesn't seem to be any logical reason why you'd drive into the centre of town.

If you were hoping for a radically different architectural style on the M2, I'm sorry.  The red and green lines were planned at the same time, though the M2 opened five years later, and so they share a great deal of the same design elements.  It does feel like there's been a slight honing of the plan; the ticket halls feel tighter, and the green line feels easier to get round.  Or perhaps I was so used to the layout by now it had become second nature.

One interesting ("interesting") difference between the M1 and the M2 is that while the trains on the red line use the third rail, the green trains get their power from overhead lines.  

The train rose up out of the tunnel and into the open air.  The M2 is the only line that has overground sections and I don't like it.  I didn't come all the way to Milan for surface railways.  I have surface railways at home.  I want tunnels and subterranean excitement.  I want a Metro that sneaks along and drops you in a new, completely different place without you knowing how you got there.  I don't want to see the next station in the distance.

This branch opened in 2011, another of those two-station extensions that Milan is so fond of.  Being above ground, it's open and light, with a spacious ticket hall that was filled at that time of the day with busy young people.

This is not a busy young person.

The reason for all these people became clear when I got outside.  This part of Lombardy has developed into a huge out of town development with offices, shops and residential towers all slotted in beside one another.  It is, I have to say, astonishingly bland and forgettable.  The district is still under construction and it's strange to walk round.  It feels very American, very Milton Keynes, a leftover from that period in the 1970s when we were convinced that Los Angeles, with its miles of freeways and car parks and straight roads, was what we should be aiming for.

The central piazza was open and laid out with interesting paving, but I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to linger here, not even to eat their sandwiches at lunchtime.  It was a void between the buildings.  I took a couple of turns, knowing which direction I needed to go but not exactly how to get there, and followed a long ramp downwards.  Halfway I realised it wasn't a pedestrian access at all, it was a service road, and I was descending behind the backs of the shops and the car parks and onto a strip of land between fire escapes.

Nothing about this said Italy.  I could've been anywhere in Europe, the back of any mall or office complex.  Thin grass had been laid out over the corners but desire paths crisscrossed them as people took the shortcut from their car to the McDonalds.  A colossal Virgin Active gym was accompanied by a cinema, run by UCI, a brand that used to be familiar in the UK but was long ago merged into Odeon.  They were boxy and unattractive.

I crossed in front a Carrefour so large it probably had its own weather system and skipped an exit from the nearby motorway.  Pedestrians were meant to follow a carefully laid out route, but I had no need to wander deep into the car parks so I stuck to the verges.  The buildings now were low 1980s business park chic, Dynasty-glass fronts done on the cheap.

All the pedestrians were going against me, walking from the station to their offices for the start of the day, formally dressed.  It really could've been Bracknell or Swindon or any other lazy punchline town.  It was generic and I was disappointed, as I always am when I travel hundreds of miles and encounter something that could be in England.  Wow me with some exotica, Milan!

I climbed the stairs up to a long scifi tunnel.  The Forum of the station name is an indoor sporting arena, the other side of the tracks; it was recently used as the host of the ice skating during the 2026 Winter Olympics.  One end of the tunnel serves the arena, the other the business park.

It's naturally extremely like its brother at Milanofiori Nord.  It's still another surface station though, so I'm not really bothered.  Get me underground!

Red Sky At Night

 

Spending the day up and down the M1 had exhausted me.  I went back to my hotel and, after a shower, collapsed on the bed and napped.  I'd wiped most of the red line away.  The rest could wait for another time.

Except...

If I got up and went out, I could finish it off, and then the whole line was done in a single day.  That'd be great, wouldn't it?  I put on some clean clothes and went out into the city.

My hotel, the Nyx Milan, was across a piazza from Milano Centrale, but I decided not to use the underground to get to my next station, Lima.  It was a simple walk across town and it had cooled down enough that it wasn't a nightmare going for a stroll.  (Incidentally, I highly recommend looking for hipster hotels owned by large chains when you go to a strange city.  The Nyx was full of bright colours and leopardprint and artwork like this:

They lowered the prices as a result, to try and attract the cool young things, but of course cool young things are staying in small boutique hotels or Air B&Bs.  It meant that I got a very reasonably priced room in a fantastic location and all I had to do was try not to cringe myself inside out when I read the irritating copy on the menu).

The area round a large European rail terminal is rarely the high point of the city.  There will be an impressive plaza out front, and some nice hotels, but if you go one street back you'll hit a dark underworld.  Milan was no different.  I was walking along roads built for a transient population.  The restaurants were small and dirty, promising fast food and cheap prices and please don't look at how filthy the floor is.  There were hostels, all with ridiculously grandiose names, the ones with two stars displaying them proudly like a child showing you it's done its poo in a potty this time.  The other people on the street were either tourists like me, blithely strolling along to get somewhere prettier, or rough individuals with dark minds and pasts.

I was weirdly offended when a man in a doorway, stopping passers-by to offer them something in a whisper, looked right past me.  Hey, I might look like a fat old man, but I might be cool!  I might want some heroin!  There's no harm in asking, is there?  

Lima metro station is on the Corso Buenos Aires, one of the principal shopping districts of Milan.  It specialises in the more down-to-earth purchases, unlike the madly expensive designer wear around the Duomo; this is where you or I would shop, where it's not eighteen hundred Euros for a plain white t-shirt.  

Lima's position on a main shopping drag meant that its mezzanine retail outlets were in a healthier state than the slightly sad empty boxes I'd seen elsewhere on the line.  There was even a bookstore, specialising in scientific texts and rarities.

The next station, Porto Venezia, is located in Milan's Gay District.  See if you can spot how I knew this.

The rainbow decoration was actually put there by Netflix; they decorated the station for an advertising campaign in 2018 and the city liked it so much they left it there.  It gave me the same warm, safe feeling I always get when I spot a rainbow flag out and about.  This is where my people are; this is ok.  If I'm in a strange place and I spot a bar with that flying over its door I know that's somewhere I can go.   The rainbow flag isn't just a political statement, it's a signal.

I also love that the homos were the ones who made over a station.  "The standardised look is fine, I guess, but couldn't we zhuzh it up a bit?"

I didn't actually go to any of the gay bars, by the way.  I'm too old for all that now.  Also, when you're an old married twat like me, you realise that the main appeal of a gay bar is meeting other homosexual gentlemen, and if you're not looking for that it's just a bar.  There are bars everywhere.  I realise this goes against all that stuff I put up there about them being havens but two things can be true at once; I like that the gay bars exist for me, I just don't necessarily need to use them.  (This is, incidentally, one of a million reasons why the Lisbon in Liverpool is my favourite place to go; it's a pub first, a gay bar second, while still being massively homosexual).  

The Porta Venezia was one of the traditional gates of Milan, a spot for defence and also custom checks.  You can still see the outline of the city walls on maps of Milan, as a busy avenue has been built where it one stood, and in the original plans for the Metro there was going to be a circle line that followed it.  I crossed over by the Tommy Hilfiger store - the retail establishments were about to take a massive swing upmarket - and onto the Corso Venezia.

That magnificent building is Milan's Natural History Museum.  I realise this is deeply offensive to all of you reading this, but I didn't go to a single museum or historic building the whole time I was there.  It was all metro, all the time.  I'm so single minded about collecting stations everything else is irrelevant.  My reasoning is that I can go back any time as a tourist, but this was my only chance to visit as an obsessive station nerd.  That had to take priority.

Palestro, like all the stations in this post, was one of the originals, opening in 1964.  The M1 hits all the main attractions of the city centre, sweeping through and out the other side, as though they were anxious they wouldn't get a second line and had to make sure it did a lot of work.  (Although, strangely, it doesn't go to Centrale).

San Babila, however, is the crossover with one of the lines they did subsequently build: the M4.  It means that what was once a simple station has been gifted an interchange, turning it into a hub.  

The works for the new line gave the city an excuse to further pedestrianise large parts of the city centre, and the Piazza San Babila was almost doubled in size.  I emerged into a clean, open square, surrounded by classy shops.

There was a large Lego store on the corner, with a bricky World Cup trophy in its window.  I should note that, even though I was in Milan in the middle of the tournament, I barely knew it was on.  Italy failed to qualify for the 2026 cup and the nation seemed to have taken a collective decision to pretend it wasn't happening.  There weren't any rows of flag bunting outside bars, no winky tenuous tie ins in shops ("enjoy our football shaped sausage roll, not affiliated with any tournament currently running in North America").  The only places where it was represented were with global brands like Lego, where they had a corporate tie-in across the planet.  It was quite lovely, actually.  Next time there's a World Cup I might find a country who didn't get in and go there for the whole month.  

I turned to find my next station and let out a tiny excited yelp.  Venini Glass?

If you're a normal person, you might know Venini as a long-established, high-end producer of glassware.  Based in Venice, they have stores in Milan, Genoa, Rome and Bologna, as well as in centres for luxurious living like Dubai and Hong Kong.  

If you're not a normal person, if you are in fact a James Bond obsessive like me, then Venini means only one thing: the place where Hugo Drax makes the vials for his nerve gas, and which houses a museum of priceless glass antiquities that 007 absolutely destroys.  This is in Moonraker, one of the finest pieces of cinema ever made.  Snobs will tell you it's nonsense, but they are fools; Moonraker is two hours of pure pleasure.  James Bond goes into SPACE!  What's not to like?

I've only included this screengrab because it is fucking cool.

Of course that's the Venice store in the movie, not the one in front of me, but I was still thrilled.  (Milan actually doesn't appear in any Bond films; the only mention of it is in For Your Eyes Only, set in Cortina, when doomed MI6 agent Ferrara says "I'll ring my office in Milan" for more information on Columbo.  The Greek smuggler, not Peter Falk).  

If the store had been open, I'd have obviously gone inside and recreated the fight scene by smashing up all the extremely expensive glassware while raising an ironic eyebrow, but alas, it was early evening, and it was closed.  Shame.

I was heading for the Duomo, theoretically.  Venini Glass had distracted me, and now I was walking along what turned out to be the wrong street.  Being above the M4 it had been paved and benches and grass laid out to make it a pleasing place to wander.  I saw a group of people eating together, and thought they'd brought a picnic, until I realised it was a soup kitchen and all the people eating were homeless.  I'm quite thick sometimes.

I crossed over by San Bernardino alle Ossa, a church famous for having an ossuary; a chapel filled with skulls and bones.  They're arranged in attractive displays and with artistic flourish, and I think if you are going to let yourself rot away, may as well do it in a charming nook in a historic church.  Better than being buried forever to be forgotten.  (I, personally, want to have an alkaline bath once I die, and then my soupy remains can be tipped into the sewers).  The statue is of Pencho Slaveykov, a Bulgarian poet, and I cannot tell you how pleased I was that it was only his hand and knees and feet that had worn to a shine.  In this day of "doing stuff for internet likes" I can quite conceive of people molesting him for TikTok views.

I paused in a Carrefour to get another bottle of water - they had a sign by the fridges, in three languages: if you need more cheese, please ask the cashier, which is an incredibly Italian thing to announce - and then back into the side streets in search of the Duomo.

There it was: I'd finally managed to locate one of the largest and most impressive cathedrals in Europe.  Considering it is the literal centre of Milan, with streets radiating out of it, the fact that I'd failed to locate it was actually something of an achievement.  

Just a pair of funny little guys, hanging out on the side of the cathedral.  I followed the road then turned onto the piazza to take a look at it from the front.

I let out my second gasp of the evening.  (Ok, I admit it; my gasp for Venini Glass was probably a little bit more excited).  The Duomo, or to give it its full name, Cattedrale Metropolitana della Natività della Beata Vergine Maria, took six hundred years to build, only declared finished in 1965 (which means the Metro station with the same name opened a year before it was completed).  It's an incredible piece of architecture, intricate and yet not overwhelming, every niche and tower decorated with some twist or statue.

The honey glow it had acquired from the late evening sun only added to its beauty.  I'd be back in the piazza a few days later, when I collected the M3, but the memory I'll retain of the Duomo is that first glimpse.  I stood and stared at it for a while, taking in the details, snapping photos, then I walked back through the crowds to the Metro station.

As the stop by the city's most famous attraction, as well as the interchange between two lines, Duomo is unsurprisingly one of its busiest stations.  It also spreads further across the adjoining streets, with entrances dotted across different corners and roads.  Inside, it got a makeover for the arrival of the M3 twenty five years after the M1 was built, and, combined with the neon glow of the new ticket barriers installed recently, it gives the ticket hall a wonderfully trippy air.

It's like Stanley Kubrick designed a metro station.

The hop to Cordusio was my shortest yet: the two stations are 340 metres apart. There's even a passageway connecting their mezzanines.  Strict Merseytart Rules dictate that a train must be taken to or from the station, however, so even though it would've been quicker to walk, I rode there.

Piazza Cordusio is an oval crossing point at the foot of Via Dante, surrounded by shops and restaurants.  Trams dinged their way past me to the nearby interchange.  Opposite was an FAO Schwarz; I didn't even know they had branches, never mind one in Europe.  A bit of digging taught me that the brand's gone under a couple of times, and is now owned by an anonymous corporation who've farmed the name out to department stores and the odd standalone.  I also learned that the famous store on Fifth Avenue - which I've been to; I bought my brother a Star Wars toy from there (he was 19 at the time) - and which appeared in Big is long closed.  It's now an Apple store, because joy is dead.

British cities are, in the main, Medieval, their streets evolving over centuries as a mishmash of closes and narrow lanes.  An overly servile devotion to the wishes of landowners means that they rarely got replanned around new avenues and boulevards; Christopher Wren was famously thwarted in his scheme to redefine the City after the Great Fire.  In Europe, however, the influence of, shall we say, dominant political leaders, means that comprehensive rebuilds of entire cities were possible.  It means that a city like Milan can routinely offer up a long, impressive avenue that looks absolutely incredible on a summer's evening.

The Via Dante was built in the late 19th centuries and lined with mansion blocks.  Each one was subject to strict specifications to ensure a conformity of style and shape, but a prize was offered to encourage architects to be brave with the decoration.  Now it's a long pedestrian artery (although traffic used it until the 1990s) lined with restaurants.  The street seating was filling up nicely and people perused the menus at their leisure.  It was, admittedly, extremely touristy - one of the restaurants on offer was the Hard Rock Cafe - but that didn't stop it from being a wonderful place to saunter.

The terminus of Via Dante is the tower of the Castello Sforzesco, once the city's main defensive hub.  The original plan was that the street would continue right through it - the castle had lost its purpose by the 19th century, and was seen as a blight to be demolished - but instead it was restored by the architect Luca Beltrami.  He brought it back as a place of pride for the city, and converted the parade ground at the rear into an extensive parkland.  I wandered around it towards the end of the week, and it's a beautiful spot to visit.

The fountain you can just about see there was lost to the construction of the Metro in the sixties; it wasn't restored until 1999.

(This post is really dragging on, isn't it?  I should've made it two separate ones.  I got bogged down in Moonraker.  There's only three stations left though.  We can make it through together.)

As a point where the M1 meets the M2, as well as the terminus for mainline railway services, Cadorna's got a larger and more impressively constructed ticket hall.  The square outside has been covered with a glass roof, too, giving you a lovely place to loiter for your taxi.

It's a very Eighties-looking roof, which is odd, because it dates from the Millennium and the introduction of a direct line to Malpensa airport.  I was finding this happening a lot, that the architectural style said a particular era to me and then it turned out to be a decade later.  This roof screamed early Docklands Light Railway to me and here it was being Jubilee Line Extension vintage.  It was as if Milan's transport authorities wanted to make sure it had got a good working out somewhere else before they'd approve its use here.

Darkness was really starting to creep in around the edges as I disappeared into the local streets.  The theme here seemed to be "quiet wealth".  The apartment blocks around me were heavy and ornate, discreetly exuding power and money.  Through the glass entrance doors I glimpsed elegant courtyards and marble steps.  Door buzzers were mounted on brass plates.

There were office blocks too, with subtle plaques confirming the presence of doctors or lawyers or architects.  The kind of business that would have a walnut panelled waiting room and a receptionist who looked like she was doing this as a filler job between catwalks.

There were people walking about, women wrapped in shawls, men in casual suits, off for a meal at one of the restaurants tucked into a tree-lined avenue.  A dad hauled his stroppy little girl along, whispering gently coaxing words, while she had a face like thunder.

The metro station was tucked underneath Piazza de Conciliazione, and I wondered how many times the people who lived round here actually used it.  Still, the staff have to get here somehow, right?

Down the steps, down to the platform, the train filled with people off for a night out now, even though it was Sunday.  The European mindset of the evening not beginning until nine pm at least.

Here it was then; the final stop for me on the M1: Pagano.  Not the most auspicious of finish lines, if I'm honest.  

Pagano's greatest asset is the large car park next door - something of a let down after the castles and cathedrals of its predecessors.  Still, in the setting sun, even that acquired a certain charm.

One very hot sweaty day, but that was it: thirty eight stations crossed off, about a third of the entire network.  I should have gone back down to get the train home but I decided on the scenic route.

Milan is crisscrossed with tram lines, mostly operated by ramshackle single cars that look like they haven't been updated for decades.  I waited by the stop with a Spanish family, laden down with their shopping, for the number 10, which would take me right the way back to Milano Centrale.

Inside there was a warm wooden interior and a hard bench to sit on.  It careened round the tracks, the driver seemingly believing that going as fast as possible between the stops was the key to getting about, with the pleasing ding of a bell whenever someone wanted a stop.  The 10 tracked around the edge of the city centre, taking its time, and when I reached the terminus it had gone dark.

What a day.  What a lot of journeys.  What a lot of journeys still to come.