MILAN: THE LAST SUPPER IN SANTA MARIA DELLE GRAZIE

The Grandma into the Teatro alla Scala

Milan is the capital of the Lombardy region, and the most populous metropolitan area. 

The wider Milan metropolitan area, known as Greater Milan, is a polycentric metropolitan region that comprehends almost all the provinces of Lombardy and the Piedmont province of Novara and has a population of about 8,500,000 people. 

Milan is an Alpha leading global city with strengths in the arts, commerce, design, education, entertainment, fashion, finance, healthcare, media, services, research, and tourism. Its business district hosts Italy's Stock Exchange and the headquarters of the largest national and international banks and companies. 

More information: Comune di Milano, Lombardia

The city is a major world fashion and design capital, well known for several international events and fairs, including Milan Fashion Week and the Milan Furniture Fair. The city hosts numerous cultural institutions, academies and universities.

Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper

Milan's museums, theatres and landmarks, including the Duomo, Sforza Castle and Leonardo da Vinci paintings such as The Last Supper in Santa Maria delle Grazie, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, attract over 9 million visitors annually. 

Milan is home to two of Europe's major football teams, AC Milan and FC Internazionale.

The etymology of Milan is uncertain. One theory holds that Milan is a Latin name; another says that is a Celtic one. In fact, the foundation of Milan is credited to two Celtic peoples, the Bituriges and the Aedui.

More information: Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper

Around 400 BC, the Celtic Insubres settled Milan and the surrounding region. In 222 BC, the Romans conquered the settlement, renaming it Mediolanum. Milan was eventually declared the capital of the Western Roman Empire by Emperor Diocletian in 286 AD.

During the Middle Ages, Milan prospered as a centre of trade due to its position. The war of conquest by Frederick I Barbarossa brought the destruction of much of Milan in 1162. Milan took the lead role in the formation of the Lombard League, formed in 1167. 

The war between the German emperor and the Italian communes continued for years, ending with the Italian victory at the Battle of Legnano. As a result of the independence that the Lombard cities gained in the Peace of Constance in 1183, Milan became a duchy.

The Grandma in Stazione Centrale, Milan

From 12th century to 19th, Milan has been dominated by different empires, kingdoms and cultures until the unification of Italy (1815-1871) when Milan fixed its position as the great city of the north of Italy and the most important business centre of Italy.

In the early 21st century, Milan underwent a series of sweeping redevelopments. Its exhibition centre moved to a much larger site in Rho, New business districts such as Porta Nuova and CityLife were constructed. With the decline in manufacturing, the city has sought to develop on its other sources of revenue, including publishing, finance, banking, fashion design, information technology, logistics, transport and tourism.

Milanese, Milanes or Meneghin is the central dialect of the Western variety of the Lombard language spoken in Milan, the rest of its metropolitan city, and the northernmost part of the province of Pavia. Milanese, due to the importance of Milan, the largest city in Lombardy, is considered one of the most prestigious Lombard variants and the most prestigious one in the Western Lombard area.

More information: Museums of Milan

The Grandma is going to travel by train in The Orient Express. She's waiting it in Milan, in Stazione Centrale and she's travelling to Venice where she's going to meet old friends.

During this long travel across Europe and Asia, The Grandma is going to talk about literature, history and art. Today, she offers two new chapters about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and later she will remember Mercè Rodoreda, the Catalan writer who was born 108 years ago in Barcelona, on a day like today, October, 10.

Milan, for me, is a city of discovery. 

You can find some amazing gardens behind some great houses; 

I also love finding beautiful galleries and incredible shops, 

but you have to explore and the food is amazing.
 

Francisco Costa

SALVADOR ESPRIU & SINERA: A MEDITATION ON DEATH

Salvador Espriu

The Grandma is in Milan, Lombardy. Tomorrow, she's going to start a new travel on The Orient Express. She has been preparing her suitcase carefully. She  wants to take profit of this travel, hours and hours of railway, and she has decided to take two books. One of them, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which she is sharing with her families on line, and Salvador Espriu's Complete Works, her favourite writer.

She wants to explain you a little about @Salvador_Espriu this fascinating man who created some of the most beautiful poems ever written and invented an own world: Sinera.

     

Now say: "The broom tree blooms,
    everywhere the fields are red with poppies.
    With new scythes we'll thresh
    the ripened wheat and weeds."

Salvador Espriu i Castelló (1913-1985) was a Catalan poet who  was born in Santa Coloma de Farners, El Baix Empordà, Girona. He was the son of an attorney. He spent his childhood between his home town, Barcelona, and Arenys de Mar, a village on the Maresme coast.

At the age of sixteen, he published his first book, Israel, written in Spanish. In 1930 he entered the University of Barcelona, where he studied law and ancient history. While traveling (1933) to Egypt, Greece and Palestine, he became acquainted with the countries that originated the great classical myths, and which would be so influential in his work.

Ah, young lips parting after dark,
    if you only knew how dawn
    delayed us, how long we had to wait
    for light to rise in the gloom!

During the Spanish civil war he was mobilised and served in military accounting.

Translated into several languages, Espriu's work has obtained international recognition, most notably the Montaigne prize (1971). He was also given the Award of Honour of Catalan Letters (1972), the Ignasi Iglesias prize (1980), the City of Barcelona Prize (1982) and the Gold Medal of the Generalitat de Catalunya (1982). He was awarded honorary doctor's degrees by the universities of Toulouse and Barcelona.

He died in Barcelona in 1985, and was buried in the Arenys de Mar cemetery, which gives name to his poem Cementiri de Sinera.

Cemetery of Arenys de Mar, El Maresme

In 1931 he published El doctor Rip, and the following year, Laia, novels that move away from the then-fashionable theoretical formulas of the aesthetics of the Catalan Noucentisme movement. The publication of Aspectes (1934), Ariadna al laberint grotesc (1935) and Miratge a Citera (1935), established him as the most original narrator of his generation. 

During the Civil War, he published Letizia i altres proses. In 1939, in occupied Barcelona and before the military conflict ended, he wrote a play, Antígona on the subject of fratricidal war and compassion for the losers.

But we have lived to save your words, 

to return you the name of every thing,
so that you'd stay on the straight path

that leads to the mastery of earth. 

Espriu, who had begun to write poetry before the war, did not publish his first volume of poems until 1946: Cementiri de Sinera, an elegy with a great formal sobriety. With this book and with the play Primera història d'Esther linguistically creative and original, began his post-war popularity, which grew as the rest of his work, essentially poetical, was published.

Salvador Espriu's poem in The Sagrada Família

In Les cançons d'Ariadna (1949) he collected a series of poems from various periods that contrasted satire and distortion with elegy and lyricism and in which the mythological subjects can be found that were to appear in subsequent works.

The four books of poems that followed, Les hores and Mrs. Death (1952), El caminant i el mur (1954) and Final del laberint (1955), compose, together with Cementiri de Sinera, a specific formal unity, on the one hand, given the symmetrical number of poems included in each volume and, on the other, the strict development of a very complex spiritual process that culminates in a mystical experience in the last book of the cycle.

We looked beyond the desert,

 plumbed the depth of our dreams,
turned dry cisterns into peaks
scaled by the long steps of time.

The tremendous public success of La pell de brau (1960) signified the popular recognition of Espriu: the author posed the historical drama of Sepharad (poet's nickname for Spain after the Jewish usage) in poems with a high spiritual, moral and political resonance.

Llibre de Sinera (1963), one of his most hermetic books, ties in with subjects from the two previous works and again circumscribes the civil ambit of his poetry to the homeland mythicized in Sinera, a word phonetically formed by spelling backwards Arenys. In Setmana Santa (1971), through the images of the ritual procession, the author presents the myth of the Catholic Passion from a metaphysical perspective.

Download A walk across Sinera: The main sceneries of Salvador Espriu

The author generically described his work as a meditation on death, but this term is too restrictive to comprehend its complexity and cultural point of view. Actually, Espriu proposes to assume the literary tradition of humanity in a personal re-creation situated in a specific geographical and historical context, Catalonia after the Spanish civil war defeat, of which he sings its failings and hope.

Now say: "We hear the voices 

of the wind on the high sea of crested grain." 

Now say: "We shall be ever faithful 

to the people of this land." 

Perhaps the most important virtue and originality of Espriu has been his capacity to reconcile, in the same unitary work, the spiritual problems of man, with metaphysical resonances, with his fate as a member of a group subjected to social and political tensions, while posing the great questions of justice and liberty.

Some fragments of Salvador Espriu's poem, La pell de brau, are sculpted in the main doors of Antoni Gaudí's Sagrada Família in Barcelona.

Download Salvador Espriu. Haikus. Mytology. Kabbalah. Metaphisic.

The Grandma loves Espriu's works and understands how important is religion for him. In Judaism, Salvador Espriu found something no other religion had done: the solving of the problem about myth and history (Qabbalah). Salvador Espriu is one of the best writers has ever existed. Their works are bright pearls in the middle of a society who lived closed and prisoned under the dark power of a cruel dictatorship. Espriu means dignity and resistance and he offers to his population a hopeful future based on the persistance reached by literature creating an hermetic, mythological and evasive world, Sinera, which if you read from the right to the left you discover that it's Arenis, then Arenys de Mar.

Escolta, Sepharad: els homes no poden ser
si no són lliures.
Que sàpiga Sepharad que no podrem mai ser
si no som lliures.
I cridi la veu de tot el poble: "Amén."

Salvador Espriu, La pell de brau

THE LAST SUPPER, WHEN TIME STOPS

The Holmes contemplate Da Vinci's The Last Supper

Today, The Holmes have reviewed some grammar and have finished their Italian travel plan after reading a new part of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

They have been talking about how to short a web adress with bitly.com and about Volcanology, Geology and earthquakes visiting an interesting web page The Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia. 

It has been a hard week for the family. They’re visiting lots of places and meeting thousands of interesting people.  Tonight, they’re in Milano, the capital of Lombardy and they’ve visited The Last Supper, the incredible painting of Leonardo da Vinci in Santa Maria delle Grazie.

Tomorrow, they’re flying to Palma, the capital of Balearic Islands. They have a meeting with the Balearic authorities and they’re going to watch an incredible phenomenon in the Majorcan cathedral.

For other hand, the family is being a victim of virus, colds and constipates and one part of its members are a little weak but strong enough to continue this fantastic travel.

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing.
Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Being willing is not enough; we must do.

Leonardo Da Vinci