above milano

The Duomo is the sun around which all tourists in Milan rotate. It's a grand cathedral, one of the largest in the world, and it's certainly a looker, although various parts - including the ever important face of the building - are sheathed in scaffolding, promising a rejuvenated facade for those visitors who show up sometime in the abstract future.

I have to admit to being fairly crestfallen having arrived in Milan to find the face of the Duomo covered. I had flashbacks to an anticlimatic Parisian experience a decade ago, finding Notre Dame similarly cloaked upon my arrival. But I'm not complaining because Milan's Duomo has a parlor trick that beats most other cathedrals hands down - you can walk on the roof.



Now, I don't mean you can climb a few flights of steps and peer over a ledge, or go up to the bell tower and check out the panorama. You can actually walk along the length of the Duomo, high about the Piazza, high above the pews, on several levels. It's the opportunity to be both in urban Milan and in the company of the alps; flanked by lines of statues and spires stretching themselves into a surreal skyline.



This summer there was the limited opportunity to visit the Duomo's roof in the early evening before nightfall. The timing was such that you could catch the sunset before being shooed off the roof - watching as the sun sank behind the mountains and the statues took a golden hue. It was a slow melting of the blue of day, the warmth of sunset growing and then evaporating into night. It was slow and instantaneous at once. Picturesque and yet impossible to truly capture.

Milan's Duomo is in the heart of the city and sits on a large piazza generally packed with people and pigeons -- often with little space between them. It shares the neighborhood with department stores, museums, and the famous glass and iron Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele II. The Duomo is fairly integrated into the city and from it's roof you get the sense that it pours people into the arteries of Milan, circling them in the piazza below and pumping them back into the city. It's the lucky ones who've stopped on the roof first.