Italy: Milan With The Best Gelato

I randomly pick a place to write about, and Milan was the lucky one. We were there on 2008 spring for a short stop between our train-flight connections to Paris, and I wished that we had stayed longer.

The City
I must say that there was nothing that special about the city. Like other major European cities, it has good plaza and old downtown with a castle. They are nice but don't bid to differ. And with limited time to go around and meeting friends, we didn't even bothered to go to museum and other cultural buildings. We came to enjoy the city, eat the foods and did a bit of shopping. Yeah, it was kind a stupid that I packed the wrong clothes since I thought it's already warm on the end of April. :P

The Duomo, probably Milan's most important landmark, an overly-decorated Gothic Cathedral, with a big and nice plaza in front of it

just beside the Duomo, stands Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, it's a haven for jetset shopping

This mosaic bull laid on the center of the Galleria, spin yourself three times with you heel on the hole, you'd get charmed with luck and come back to Milan soon.. I did, 5 days later I came back to catch a train connection to Slovenia

The downtown of Milan (above and below), proximity with the Castello, another Milan's landmark

The Castle and The Park



The Foods!
This is the part I excited about. Lucky for us, we have a friend that show us where the treasures. One of them was the best gelato (italian word for ice cream, just in case you don't familiar). It was Chocolat, a small gelato and chocolate bar just outside the center. I kinda expect world-class gelato when my friend, Alfa, suggested that it was the probably the best gelato in the world, and I was far from disappointed. It was truly heaven for both chocolate and ice cream lover. The dark chocolate gelato varians were like melting a cool chocolate on your mouth! My favorite was the mix between spicy (with chili peppers) dark chocolate, pistacios, rhum chocolate and honey covered hazelnut! When we came back to Milan 5 days later, it was the first and only place in our head to dash into before catching our train. Alfa told me that on summer, there can be a really long line of people craving for a scoop or two. Hey, even we were there on a cold spring, there was quite a line! Visit their website for more information and make you drool.


For more good foods, my friend took us to another part of Milan, Naviglie. There we had some nice pizza and great warm banana-nutella crepes.

Naviglie, a part of Milan

The People
Like many other modern metropolitan in the world, you hardly see any hospitality in Milan. But I still find interesting people around. Sorry I only took a bit of picture

one of common sight on Milan.. heavily branded

the polices that happy to pose

street entertainers during waiting for the traffic light

The Future
I saw this expo about proposed new Milan city center.. Seems neat.


Cheers and happy traveling!