Many of you have asked me about the foto on the home page of CosituttiMarketPlace.com. It's a photograph of Navigli, an artsy part of the city of Milan with trendy nightclubs, shops and restaurants and a series of artificial canals designed by Leonardo da’ Vinci. A special part of Italy I have come to love.
Milan and its metropolitan commune are home to a branch of our Italian cousins and flying into Malpensa has always been a starting point for my taste travels in Italy, many which begin and end in and around Navigli. Before leaving on an Italian version of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride through Northern Italy, Tuscany and Umbria visiting regional producers (many now friends) that I source for CosituttiMarketPlace, I spend time in Milan with la famiglia. Time spent with generational layers of the past wrapped around new memories of the present with a loving Italian family I am so happy to know. Wonderful times eating, cooking, shopping and seeing Milano through their eyes and getting to know Italy in a unique and personal way.
Like Stendahl an ardent fan of all things Italian and a well-known impressionistic travel writer, I aspire to my time spent in Milan to be entirely devoted to love and leisure. Stendahl obsessed for years about the unrequited love of a woman he had met in Milan. He even wrote a book about it that contains some very profound thoughts on love including this one “In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future.” Despite personal rejection,Stendhal tells us that his time spent in Milan was one of the happiest times of his eventful life. I can understand this. Although you might think that the magic of Italy only happens under the Tuscan sun or on the coasts of Amalfi, Milan is full of surprises. There is much to do and see in Milan and it is a pity that it is often overlooked by most travelers to Italy.
On my last trip to Milan I spent the day with our cousins at their apartment in Porto Genova, a neighborhood of Milan named after the city gate of the old Spanish Walls of Milan. Porta Genova is a short distance from the Navgli canals and the Darsena (the old dock) where two major Navigli meet, the Naviglio Grande and the Naviglio Pavese. Looking for midday snack we ate cones of fried seafood in Navigli. That evening I found myself at a ristorante near Giardini di Via Stendhal, a local park named after the author. A perfect place to enjoy a leisurely passeggiata thinking that unlike Stendhal my recollection of love in past times only gets better on each trip to Milan.
Pesce fritto al cono - A Snack at Pescheria Il Kiosko in Navigli