X.viii. In a Milan Garden

"But Fancy with the speed of fire
Hath passed to Milan's loftiest spire,
And there alights 'mid that aerial host
Of Figures human and divine,
White as the snows of Apennine
Indurated by frost."
- William Wordsworth

Not much is left of the Milan where Augustine gave his sermons. The roman walls and academies have been replaced by fashionistas and haughty storefronts, but the occasional quiet garden can be glimpsed through the closing gate from which a businessman or black Mercedes exits. The outer face of the city is grim, grimier even than Warsaw or Pittsburgh, but it hides unique treasures, cloistered away from the frenetic tempo of the sprawling city.
    Mediolanum, meaning "middle of the plain" in the drawn out Latin, is where Lombardy comes together and finally confides in the Po valley to take it east towards Emilia. Like Bologna, it used to be a city of water, crisscrossed by canals, but its constant wealth has made for dense, often unrecoverable layers of history. Most famous is Leonardo's Last Supper, so unendingly controversial, that, like the past, disintegrates a little more each day.
    If Leonardo was the intellectual that definitively ended the middle ages, eleven centuries earlier someone else was in Milan instigating them. Saint Augustine moved to the city in 383, still reeling from a youth of theft and recklessness, not yet entirely sure what he was. He became friends with Ambrose, a bishop whose immense basilica is still one of the city's major monuments. Augustine is in the shoe-soles of my first adolescent steps, or at least the gentle, passionate part of him that penned the Confessions, the instigator of my journeys through Petrarch and Keats. I had less time for the eight hundred or so sermons he left behind, but being in Milan, the city where he settled, converted, and ultimately found great fame, I thought a great deal about him, his uncanny self-awareness, his humanity. I think that if I could I would aspire to be another Augustine.
    In Pavia, two days ago, Sarah and I had even been able to glimpse the saint's tomb, a haughty affair of marble angels, but that was all. In Milan we were on the hunt for early medieval ivories and a certain fifth century mosaic fragment of the good shepherd, but no Augustine. By the end of the day, Sarah had seen her mosaic and even purchased a handbag from a suitably elegant shop on Corso Ticinese and I, I had no more reason to continue on to anxious Petrarch or tragic Keats. The day was done.