Milano, business and supper

I recent­ly made a short “busi­ness” trip to Milano, city which in the past I had only bypassed on the way to oth­er north Ital­ian cities. Milano shows its past and present pow­er pret­ty much every­where, start­ing with a robust and dom­i­nant architecture.

My busi­ness con­sist­ed on select­ing and buy­ing five to six cuts of suit fab­ric for the next char­ac­ters in “The Board­room”, the last and remain­ing part of the APEX series. As charm­ing as Dublin can be, this sort of fab­ric sim­ply can’t be found here… so I revert­ed to the fash­ion fac­to­ry itself: dis­tances in Europe are short!

My Dublin Ital­ian con­nec­tions tipped me off in advance, and I went straight to a spot where great fab­rics were offered “scam­poli” — at an afford­able price (a tenth of the retail cost). These are cuts which would­n’t be enough to make a suit (I learned that at least you need 6 meters for one suit) but were per­fect for my new set of “can­vas­es”.

The select­ed shop, “Il Vec­chio Drap­piere”, was every­thing I wished for. A Milanese fam­i­ly busi­ness sole­ly ded­i­cat­ed to sell the best qual­i­ty suit fab­rics with hun­dreds of pat­terns and tex­tures to choose from, and all the time in the world to do so. What’s best, it’s loca­tion in Via Mer­av­igli made obvi­ous a vis­it to San­ta Maria Delle Gra­zie, to admire the restored “Last Sup­per” by Leonardo.

Hope­ful­ly this back­ground sto­ry will fur­ther enrich this series of paint­ings about the pow­er dri­ven spec­i­men among us, every­day humans.