Finito.

My last few hours in Milan before heading to the airport, and home. Mid-afternoon, thirty degrees, hot, sticky, big city, crowds. Shattered. Time to sign off.

Yesterday I did manage to fit in a couple of extra sights before the heat became unbearable. First it was onto the metro and out to the west.

The San Siro Stadium wax originally named as such to reflect the district it’s in, but in 1980 noit was actually renamed after Guiseppe Meazza, one of the great figures of post-war Italian football. So although it’s commonly called the San Siro Stadium – even by the public transport people – it should probably be known by its new name, the Guiseppe Meazza Stadium. The San Siro Stadium was originally opened in 1926, but the iconic renovation incorporating the famous swirly towers was undertaken in the 1980s as a facelift ahead of Italy’s hosting of the 1990 World Cup.

It must be one of few great stadia that look truly awe-inspiring and monumental from the outside, but I of course wanted to go inside to take in the views familiar to football fans the world over for thirty years, and to sense something of the place that AC Milan and Inter Milan players and fans call their home.

And that was the tricky bit today.

Sure, they do a stadium tour you can book at the gate, and there were a number of tourists milling around the vast concourse and various food concessions were setting up, but the tourists were milling around confused because the gates were shut. And all the food outlets were just setting up,  not actually serving anyone, although it was nearly midday…as if they were preparing for something else…

What was going on? The Italian domestic football season had been wrapped up a couple of weeks before. The national team were indeed playing that night, but down the road in Bologna. I kept wandering around, and eventually found the ticket office. Which had a sign up.

Never heard of him.

Having made the, ahem, sacrifice of going out all that way, I came back into town and tried my luck at La Scala. They do a museum tour that includes a visit to the auditorium itself, a place familiar to opera lovers the world over since its opening in 1778. You yourself can experience something of the place that great composers such as Verdi and Puccini have graced, that all the great artistes like Caruso, Callas, Pavarotti…

You can see where we’re going with this. The museum was open but the auditorium was not; there was some matinee performance of something going on and they closed that part of the tour. I’d even booked ahead for this one, but maybe once again I hadn’t done the research. So I was just left with the paintings and sculptures of the greats in the museum. Here’s Verdi.

From that point I stopped trying to get into anything that required tickets – museums, churches – and as it got hotter I resorted to looking for a bite to eat and something to drink.

My last day was much the same. With a late flight booked I had time to do some strolling through the Castello Sforzesco…

…and the courtyard of the Brera Museum…

…before I realised it was all too crowded and steamy for me.

So now I’m near the station waiting for the moment to head to the airport. Which gave me time for some new snaps to, ahem, admire Centrale Station’s Futuristic motifs and its Fascistic oppressiveness.

I don’t like ending my tour on such a downer, but it had to end somewhere and we have all already been treated to some fantastic places during this tour. These last photos show us that when our species tries to outdo the eternal grandeur and majesty of the natural world with our own bombast, not only do we fall far short, we become prisoners of our own lack of humility, and – as happened here – millions of our fellow citizens end up becoming real prisoners, or worse.

Hunkered by a massive archway at the station exit, dwarfed by the scale of this monument to war-mongering dictatorship, the authorities had set up a little tent to receive refugees from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I prefer the natural mountains to the man-made ones. They represent peace, not war.

See you all on the road again soon.