A postcard from Lombardy

 I've been travelling again, this time to the Lombardy region of Northern Italy. It's not so easy blogging when you're staying with someone you'd rather not know that you were trans.

I've been to Milan, which I've written about many times before. As news about food is just as popular here as news about frocks, you might like to know that my host and I went to try out a restaurant run by a young woman who won Masterchef Italia a few years ago. The food is this sort of modern multisensation style in one plate. So, for instance, one dish was warm fish with cold soft cheese, crunchy crumble, squidgy caperberries and tomato puree. It's an odd collection of textures, temperatures and flavours in your mouth all in one go and we weren't so sure she'd quite got the knack. But the pudding, a sort of tiramisù ice-cream bombe, was really excellent, and so was the wine. The service, though, was very attentive and friendly, the prices were reasonable and she's not a snob celebrity chef but one who welcomes the clients, takes orders and clears tables as necessary. (Their website seems to be only in Italian but the menu page has English too: Konnubio menu)

Music seems to be another topic of interest to my readers. 

 

"The Soul of Music" sculpture outside Cremona's Violin Museum

I have been to Cremona, a small but historic city on the broad river Po.

Cremona cathedral and baptistry. There was a peace rally going on in the square here. Pity about the grey day

 

For centuries Cremona has been the home of the world's finest musical instrument makers, the most famous being Antonio Stradivari. There's a brand new Violin Museum there which is also a treasure-house holding some of the world's most famous stringed instruments, centuries old, still playable and worth squillions. 

The main gallery is almost creepy, like mummies in an Egyptian museum, but this is full of priceless violins, like Andrea Amati's 1566 "Charles IX", Stradivarius's 1715 "Cremona", Guerneri del Gesù's 1734 "Stauffer" and more. Awesome.

 

Here's a member of staff nonchalantly hanging Stradivarius's 1668 "Golden Bell" violin, which the ladies in the background have been permitted to examine close up. It's worth an estimated 10-15 million. I couldn't do his job: I get nervous; I break things!

 

If you prefer the guitar to the fiddle, the city art gallery has a collection of guitars tracing the whole history of the instrument from its beginnings to the near-present, with room after room of beautiful instruments.

Then there was the amazing local lunch, and more ...but I'll have to write about that another time. 

Thanks for reading this "postcard". Wish you were here!

Have a nice weekend. 

Sue x