X.vi. Gra Car

"As the train moved along the bank I awaited from afar the lantern and the spires of the Certosa. Behind a gathering of poplars it appears; its bricks form clusters of columns and the square towers of the apse support their little pinnacles with ease, perhaps too much ease. The reddish church stands out in the middle of the alluvial plain, among the marshes. It searches in vain for the city that guaranteed its prosperity. The wall that surrounds the complex out of which this tanned giant rises never encircled anything but a tomb, separating its silent custodians from the rest of the world…"
- André Maurel

Early on a Thursday morning I met Sarah at the station in Milan, not as auspiciously as in Paris for the fascist gargoyles of Milano Centrale are no Gare du Nord, but the prospect of four Italian days, reunited, was nonetheless a joy. We had planned for a busy first day, somewhat ambitious considering our mutual lack of sleep. It was not even eight o'clock however, and the day that lay before us was long. We made our way to the Brera after a cappuccino that seemed to recall my companion to her thoughts, then to the Poldi-Pezzoli museum, and to the Duomo, centre of Milanese congestion. Finally, out of the city to the Charterhouse of Pavia, and to Pavia itself, then back across Milan to Lissone and the apartment of my friend Cecilia, who had graciously lent it to us. It seemed an impossible itinerary for one single day, but in the end we were successful.
    The world has changed a lot since the Grand Tour. Things are closer together than in the time of Goethe and Byron. Trains rush incessantly between cities, museums are open late, and seeing an altarpiece no longer requires a protestant pleading letter to a romish bishop. This is a remarkable change.
    Even within the past few years, a revolution has occurred for our purposes, and the internet is now the traveler's greatest friend. For the tourist it is a false front, luring him unawares into package deals and all-inclusive cruises, but for the traveler, the real, hardened lover of exploration, there has been no greater leap forward than this. Knowledge has been grandiosely democratized, and every itinerary, down to the smallest detail, can be planned with a few clicks. My technique of sketching out the planned route of each day of travel on a sheet of paper, filling in the hours each museum would be open, when each train or bus would leave, what alternates were available, and so on, would not have been possible ten years ago without a flurry of frustrating phone calls. Fifty years prior it would not have been possible at all.
    With a little bit of planning, more is within a day's reach than ever, and those lengthy peregrinations of two centuries past are all but obsolete, because modernity, for all its discontents, has distilled the world that lies before us. A few days here and there, a steady heel and a well-packed lunch, and everything is possible.
    "Europe used to be cheap," our elders always said, but Europe also used to be closed, dilapidated or under interminable restoration. Now it was open, and even the Carthusian monk who that afternoon noiselessly guided us from one part of the Certosa to the other seemed pleased to see us, even as we declined the opportunity to purchase the premises' namesake liqueur. The charterhouse, intact down to the brass taps that feed the ancient lavabo in the cloister, is the privileged home to some twenty-four monks who guard the tombs of the once-powerful Visconti dynasty. Each of these custodians lives in an identical miniature brick house, complete with garden, fireplace, and personal well, arrayed in rhythmic intervals around an immense cloister. Called the Gratiarum Cartusiae, the charterhouse of the graces, it surges up from the lush Lombard countryside, underrated because no other romantic adventure travel tales have sprung from it, however fertile the ground might be. The whole complex is surrounded by several kilometres of a severe wall, which evidently fell beyond the spectrum of our meticulous planning, and we were forced to circumvent it on foot in the baking sun of a very hot day before finally reaching the single entranceway that even modernity couldn't bring closer. Still, the trek was worth the reward of a cool, oasis-like interior, though before long we were out again beyond the walls, continuing our day in the verdant but shadowless plain.



The ornate façade of the Charterhouse


A certain someone in the little cloister


The fantastical, immaculately preserved brickwork of the Certosa


The larger cloister, surrounded by twenty-four identical monk houses