On to Milan (Italy 2025 part 9)

I had a few hours to wander around Tirano before I had to check out of the hotel and head into Milan. (Though since I slept in and had a leisurely breakfast, it was probably more like an hour.) There isn't all that much in Tirano that I was interested in, but right around the corner from the hotel was this building that I had noticed on Google Maps, in a rather out-of-place modern style and housing a little mall. I figured I might as well swing by and get some pictures for the blog, to try to have at least something retail related to post. 

I'm not really sure if Bobo's Pub is still open or not. It never came up when I was searching Google Maps for restaurants, but it does show up if you search for it specifically. It looked very closed when I was there, but Italian businesses tend to have security grills over the windows that often make restaurants look abandoned when they're actually just open limited hours (which is the norm for restaurants in Italy). 

The rest of the mall is pretty much dead, with just a couple stores and some offices (overflow from the office tower above, I guess). Oddly, right up front there's a giant jewelry store with a whole storefront dedicated to Swarovski -- Swarovski really has stores everywhere these days! 

Then it was time for another ride on a boring (at least compared to the last couple days!) train to head back to Milan. I ended up sitting in the "safe and quiet on board" section (with the name strangely all in English but the explanation all in Italian -- from what I could gather, this part of the train has extra surveillance cameras and is supposed to be monitored more closely, but I didn't notice anything). 

It's not as spectacular as the Alps we've been looking at, but there were some nice views coming around Lake Como. 

The train from Tirano heads directly to Milano Centrale, but my hotel was over by Porta Garibaldi, so I had to change trains at Monza... where I think someone might have been trying to pickpocket me, or maybe I was just being paranoid and they were just being careless with where they were walking. (There was another time on this trip where I thought someone was trying to pickpocket me again, but it turned out to be a baby in a stroller who was kicking me.) This was another pretty uninteresting trip on another Hitachi Rock, just like Bologna to Milan, except the train stopped way further down the platform than everyone was expecting so I had to run after it and then everyone was crammed into the back car of the train, leaving me to stand with all of my luggage. Oh well, it was just a couple stops to where I was headed. 

My hotel was just a few blocks from Porta Garibaldi, but instead of walking, I decided to take the trams -- first heading west one stop on one of the 1920s-era trams...

And then heading south one stop on one of the 1950s ones. It would have made a lot more sense to just walk, but this is more fun! 

After checking in, I had a whole afternoon with nothing really planned. I decided I would try to ride every model of tram currently in service in Milan, and ended up on a 1970s "Jumbotram". It's hard to see in the picture, but the stop requested indicator light is just a row of 3 bare incandescent bulbs -- you can see the filaments quite clearly in person. 

It's funny to see an ad for smartphones on a tram built when regular telephones were still somewhat of a luxury! When this tram was built, the first trans-Atlantic telephone call had happened only a few years earlier; now when I go to Italy, I can call home for free over the internet. Technology is an amazing thing. It's also kind of crazy that a 100-year-old tram, which would be considered a heritage vehicle anywhere else, has an ad-wrap at all, but that just shows how these are a normal part of life in Milan! 

The main hub for Milan's trams is at the Duomo, which is always an impressive sight. The LED billboard on the scaffolding on the left side is even more incongruous than the tram ads! I was kind of hoping I would catch it showing something embarrassing, but all of the ads were for highly uncontroversial topics, so I'm guessing they were curated for the church location. 

 

 

Right next to the Duomo is the famous Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, a mall that's mostly home to touristy restaurants and luxury stores. There's certainly nothing I would want to actually buy here, but the architecture is pretty cool! The place was packed, but I'm pretty sure most people were just passing through and/or checking out the architecture like I was. 

I was impressed to see that La Feltrinelli, Italy's chain bookstore, still has a location here. 

This is more representative of the typical stores in this place. Yep, another Swarovski store! 

The central dome is quite impressive, from floor to ceiling. It would be really cool if there was a way to get up closer to that glass ceiling. 

I also quite like the half-dome at the back entrance. 

Next to the front entrance is an area where you can get into the upper floors of the mall, a food court called Il Mercato del Duomo. This is connected to the Motta in the first picture, and the whole thing is run by Autogrill (like pretty much every food court in Italy). 

It's not the most interesting place, but if I see an escalator oddity, I just have to post that here! The zigzag escalators only take you to the 2nd floor; continuing up from there involves this weird setup, where there's a small flight of stairs that takes you to an escalator to go the rest of the way.

I just had to laugh at the Old Wild West thing.

There's the Autogrill logo to confirm that they're running the whole thing. For all I know, they might even have something to do with La Feltrinelli!

Up until this point, I had unintentionally been riding the trams in order from oldest to newest. If I had paid enough attention to realize that, I could have continued on with that pattern, but instead I ended up hopping on one of the newest trams, the late-00s series 7600 Sirietto tram made by Breda. These trams are extremely green on the inside! I quite like the color they chose, but it's a bit much having practically every surface be that color. 

I rode that a few stops, then hopped on a slightly-older but near-identical series 7500 tram back to the Duomo area. 

At this point, I only had two types left, one of which only runs on the line 15. So that was my obvious next route, but the first tram to come by was a series 7100 Sirio, the older and larger version of the Sirietto from a minute ago. 

I took that tram for a while, hunting down the rarest tram type Milan has. Eventually, I got off at one of the only stops where I could get to the stop in both directions without having to cross the street, ready to hop on one of these 90s Eurotrams going either direction, and was excited to see that the next tram heading back into Milan was one of these goofy-looking things. These have been restricted to the line 15 for basically their entire service lives, since they were quickly found to be unable to handle the tight curves on the rest of the network when they entered service (apparently line 15 is the least curvy part of Milan's tram network), and I did notice that the ride quality was pretty bad going around corners. As you can see, these trams are looking quite rough (with the back compartment of the train, where I decided to sit since it was empty, not even having any working lighting), and they're the only ones that haven't been repainted into the current yellow livery, so I wonder if they're going to get retired soon despite being only 25 years old. And I guess that means that AdTranz (which was bought by Bombardier shortly after building these trams) might be the only company out there that made trains so bad that they made the Bredas that came after them look good!

Having accomplished my tram goal, I decided to hop off at the point where the line 15 connects to the trolleybus loop and ride some trolleybuses. Unfortunately, right at that point, some sort of farmer tractor protest came through and blocked everything up for quite a while (looks like nearly 15 minutes based on my photo timestamps). It was kind of entertaining at first, but it was getting late and I wanted to get going already.

The first bus to come by was a new Solaris Trollino. These are seemingly becoming the standard trolleybus worldwide, with Vancouver recently ordering a bunch to replace their current fleet and King County Metro ordering some battery versions which I'm suspecting are a pilot with an eye towards buying the trolleys in a few years. 

While Milan's trolleybus lines are theoretically a loop, the loop is broken up on the southwest and southeast corners, forcing transfers to keep going on what's labelled as being the same line. I didn't mind, because the next bus along was one of the older and less common Van Hool fleet. That meant I was able to ride all types of trams and trolleybuses in Milan in one afternoon, something that only a massive transit geek like me would care about. 

I took this bus around to the north side of the city where I had heard rumors that Milan's newest tram model, from Stadler (the same company that made all of the new RhB trains), might have entered service on a couple lines up there. After hanging around for a while and only seeing Sirios/Siriettos, I decided to give up and head back to get dinner, since it was getting late and I was hungry. It's a good thing I didn't wait any longer, since those trams hadn't actually entered service yet, and wouldn't until two days after I left Milan. 

I have to apologize again for my daily posting schedule falling apart lately. While a normal set of 4 retail photos takes me around half an hour, an hour tops, to write, these travel posts have been taking me 2-3 hours each, and I just don't have the time for that every day. I'm going to have to change something with my schedule, maybe mixing in standard retail posts with these long travel blogs, or maybe just not posting every day until I'm done -- we'll see what happens this week.