I have never once arrived in Milan and felt welcomed. This is not a complaint; it is, I have come to think, the whole point of the place. Other Italian cities rush out to meet you at the station with their arms full of colour, all Renaissance and lemon light and easy charm. Milan keeps its hands in its pockets. It looks you over, decides on balance that you will do, and then turns and walks off into its own business, and you are expected to follow or not, as you please.
In August it scarcely troubles to look at all. Half the city has fled to the sea and the mountains, the shutters are down over the good shops, whole streets stand echoing and shadeless, and the heat lies on the pavements from noon until nearly dark. A lesser city would feel abandoned. Milan only feels unobserved, like a great house whose owners are away, and there is a rare freedom in moving through it while it isn’t watching, so long as you keep to the shade and surrender the middle of the day to the sun.
So I waited for the evening, and then I followed. The worst of the glare had finally loosened its grip, the light going long and amber down the avenues and pooling gold in the tram tracks, when I presented myself for the one thing in this city you cannot simply wander into. You have to want it in advance. You have to reserve your fifteen minutes like a doctor’s appointment, booking it weeks ahead the way I explain in my guide to seeing the Last Supper, and then arrive, slightly nervous, at Santa Maria delle Grazie in the blue warmth of a summer dusk while a small line of strangers fans itself with paper tickets in the last of the sun.
I will not pretend I was calm about it. I had wanted to stand before The Last Supper since I was a girl leafing through my grandmother’s art books in France, and there is always a risk, isn’t there, that a thing you have loved from a distance will shrink when you finally meet it. That it will turn out smaller, or duller, or simply more famous than itself.
They take you through in stages, through a set of glass doors that sigh shut behind you, sealing you off from the warm street and the century you arrived in. The air changes. After the heat outside it turns suddenly cool and hushed, held at whatever temperature keeps a dying painting from dying faster, and the warmth lifts off your skin like a breath you had been holding all day. Then the last door opens, and you are in the old refectory where the monks once ate their silent suppers, and there it is on the far wall, enormous and pale and impossibly quiet.
Fifteen minutes. I had thought that would be nothing, a glance and a photograph and a shuffle back out into the evening. Instead it was almost too much. The painting is half a ruin, you understand. Leonardo worked it in a way that was doomed almost before it dried, and it has been fading and flaking and lovingly rescued for five centuries, and somehow that is the whole of its power. It is not a picture so much as the ghost of one. You are not looking at a masterpiece in its pride; you are looking at what time has left of a moment, the instant after He has said that one of them will betray Him, and the whole table breaking into motion around a stillness at its centre.
I did not take many photographs. It felt like the wrong verb for the room. I stood, mostly, and let the minutes go, and when the far door opened again to send us back out I found I was not ready, which is, I suppose, the only honest review a person can give.
Out in the evening the city had softened by a degree, the way Milan does only once the sun is off it. I walked back through the Galleria, its glass roof catching the last of the light, and did the thing you are supposed to do, planting my heel on the poor worn bull beneath the mosaic Taurus and turning my little circle for luck, laughing at myself, because one should never be too dignified for a bit of nonsense. If you would like the proper accounting of this city, its churches and its quarters and the order to see them in, I have set it all down in my complete guide to Milan. But that evening I wanted none of it. I wanted a marble-topped table, something cold, and the company of my own thoughts.
I found it at the counter of an old bar off the arcade, the kind with a brass rail and a barista who has been polishing the same machine since before I was born. I ordered a glass of Franciacorta, cold and pale gold, and stood at the bar the way the Milanese do, upright and unhurried, making no occasion of it, while the little plates of nothing-in-particular appeared beside it without my asking. Out along the Navigli the aperitivo hour was filling the towpaths with low golden noise, and if you want to know where to stand in it I have written that down too, in my evening guide to the Navigli and the aperitivo. The heat was finally leaving the marble, the swallows were out over the rooftops, and the city that had refused me all day was, in the warm dark, beginning at last to soften.
It never does quite welcome you, Milan. But if you are patient, and you come in the cool of the evening, and you ask nothing of it, there is a moment near the end of the day when it forgets to keep its hands in its pockets, and that, I have decided, is the closest this magnificent, guarded city comes to holding out its arms.
