Fresh off a flight to Milan, waiting for my suite at the Hotel Principe di Savoia, I had lunch in its Ristorante Acanto. Savoring a plate of warm linguine topped with Calvisius caviar and dried caviar shavings, a dish devised by chef Matteo Gabrielli as an homage to Gualtiero Marchesi, the father of modern Italian cuisine, I got to thinking about my past in Milan, the northern city that’s the symbol of both business and luxury Italian-style.
When I first arrived in the late 1980s, covering fashion shows as a young columnist for the New York Times, I stayed just across Piazza della Repubblica at The Palace, then the Principe’s modern sibling in the Ciga Hotel family; it was considered all-business. The Principe’s denizens were grand fashion editors and merchants, who delighted in its profound luxury. Now, the Palace is a Westin, and the Principe one of the Dorchester chain’s grand, old-world palace hotels. I wanted a weekend in that Milano, a place of cosseting, old-fashioned elegance.
Ristorante Acanto
Indeed, the trip was planned to be all-luxury from the moment of take-off. So, it was also the first time I tried La Compagnie, the two-jet airline that flies business-class-only to Milan, Paris and in summertime, Nice. Its lie-flat seats, gourmet food, Gulfstream-style take-offs and personal service more than make up for having to fly in and out of Newark and Milan’s Malpensa, neither offering an experience worth mentioning.
But back to Milan, where my wife and I also chose to sample vogue-ish high-end restaurants rather than old reliables. The first night, we hit Osteria Serafina, unrelated to America’s restaurants of that name, where the food is, as an ‘80s fashion brand put it, classico con twist. The next, wrapped in the dark-wood-and-mirrored ambience of Al Baretto Sant’Ambrogio, I ate violet artichokes and classic veal Milanese surrounded by the young and pretty patrons of this modernized tribute to the city’s high-end classics.
10 Corso Como
In between, we shopped 10 Corso Como, a modern fashion concept store in an old garage, and took in Anselm Kiefer’s The Women Alchemists, a site-specific installation of forty-two monumental paintings of mostly forgotten female pioneers of chemistry and medicine in the awesome Sala delle Cariatidi of Milan’s Palazzo Reale. Erected in the late 18th century, left scarred by World War II bombing, and only semi-restored, it evokes the ravages of war beside the magnificence of civilization in the interplay of Kiefer’s work and 28 crumbling caryatid sculptures used as architectural supports. Then, it was back to the Principe, where the modern and the classic combine seamlessly, and luxury is revealed as the city’s defining business.
Sala delle Cariatidi, Palazzo Reale
