Seeing the beautiful Turin and the museum of cinema

Good day to everyone. Last time we travelled from Milan to Turin. In Turin we had a football game booked for Saturday, but before that we had two days to discover the city. On our first day we went to Turin’s famous cinema museum. The museum is in the tallest building of the city Mole Antonelliana and it also has a viewing level where we could see the city. First two days there was some mist or something like that in the air so we couldn’t see too far, especially to the Alps.

M

Views from the top, but the horizon was hazy

Good weather to chill and look at a new city

The cinema museum was huge. Took us around three hours to get through it and we walked by a lot of the stuff. The museum had a lot of history on how visuals have been used in story telling from shadow art to first images to the first videos and movies to the modern cinema. I know there is something interesting in seeing the history of how cameras were invented, but there is a limit to how many different lenses a man can take. The real point of the museum was a cathedral like room which filled the dome of the building. The room had screens and info sheets spiralling around the walls. At the bottom there were chairs where you could lie down and watch some clips of movies relating to the current exhibition - which focused on movies based on comics, manga or graphic novels. After all the walking around it was great to just get to chill for a bit and watch the clips even though they were in Italian. From there we kept it a chill day and ended up eating at a nice restaurant called Nautilus which was near our Airbnb apartment. The restaurant was modelled after a submarine from the Jules Verne books. Was a cool place and pretty good food. That’s all for now. Until next time.

Pieces of the exhibition

Never seen this Star Wars poster before

The main room was great with different levels of videos and pieces to watch

Lift to the view level went straight through the dome

Restaurant

Cool setting

Anne had a triple mini burger set

Until next time my friends

Break from studying: Easter holiday in Italy

Hello again people. Hope everyone had a good Easter and got their serving of Mämmi for the year. As we have a massive two week break at the TU Graz we decided to take a looong vacation and go tour northern Italy. Our tour de Italy consists of Milan - Turin - La Spezia - Mantua - Venice. My family will come to meet us in Venice for the last stint of the trip to celebrate some family occasions. Anne and I have been in Italy for a week and I am writing this currently in Mantua or Mantova, depending on language. Sorry, the blogs are going to be little lagging behind as its hard to make the time when on vacation and not all our accommodations have Wifi and posting requires a lot of that Internet thingy. Also, since the trip is 15 days and I don’t want to write 15 different posts I might compact things up into a few days and only go over the bigger things we have done and just post pictures of others. On top of that I might not have the energy to double check every typing or name of place so there will be some mistakes somewhere. Hope you can keep up as the next many posts will be about Italy.

We started our trip by flying from Vienna to Milan. This sounds little odd, but surprisingly there is very little trains and buses from Graz to Italy and they are slow, and we didn’t want to make 12-hour bus rides. Milan was not originally in our plan, but there were no direct flights to Turin which was our first major goal. So, Milan was the closest we could get, and we had a late flight, so we decided to stay the night in Milan and in the morning go around for a few hours and then head to Turin on a train.

 

In Milan with our few hours we had to spend there we just wanted to wander the old town and see the highlights. We went to see the Cathedral Il Duomo, which was nice and big. Surprisingly the churches were not super crowded even though it was close to Easter. Only thing relating to that there was an orchestra practising their Easter show so we got to hear a little of it for free while we toured the massive church. When we were there it was two days after the Notre Dame fire in Paris and lots of people had that in mind when you over heard conversations and there was also renovations being done to the roof of Il Duomo. The cathedral was big, but not sure what else to say about it. After that we walked through the fancy market building Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. It is a nice building, but we can only dream of shopping there. On our way out we stopped by a big Ferrari store which was cool, but again high prices scared us away. From there we had a quick lunch and headed to Turin. That is where I will continue in my next post. Later.

Simple breakfast at the hotel to kick off the day

We found a pink car

Duomo is damn impressive on the outside and filled with detail

There was statues even at the top of the long ass columns

Orchestra practising

Detail on this statue holding a skull and snake was cool

Looots of windows

I found these paintings interesting. Showing battle between good and evil and the red spears look like light sabers

Entrance to the market, shopping hall was big

Ferrari store... wroom wroom

The Milan central station is pretty impressive

Final chapter of the Vienna trilogy

Hello again again. It is time for the third day recap of our Vienna excursion. We had our train back to Graz in the evening, so we had the day to keep wondering and investigating the historic Vienna.

Again, we left out apartment quite early and just picked up some breakfast on the go. First, we wanted to head to the cathedral of Vienna. I want to note that yes lots of the places we walk by are churches, but that’s how it is in an old catholic country. Anyway, the St Stephan’s church in Vienna is a really beautiful and interesting building on the outside and fairly interesting on the inside as well. I found a problem with the church - there was a lot of tourists and the church felt very monetized and heavy on making money. It felt little odd at a church and reminded me of a similar cathedral in Prague where I felt the same. There was an electric screen advertising concerts and other events at the church and a store was set inside the church and all this took away some of the awe and spiritual affect that churches especially the big ones have. Still it was nice, and the roof especially is cool and different.

Roof was really special looking

From the church we took a walk route around the old town. We found it from our Austria travel book. We walked by a Jesuit church which was interesting with having more colour like red and green. Also noteworthy were the different shaped pillars in the church, some of them were quite funny. Along the walk we walked by a few other old churches but decided not to go inside. There was an old Jewish quarter with and old mechanical clock. This was interesting and at every hour a historical figure appeared in the images to ring the bell.

The clock on the wall

After the tour we went to the national library of Vienna. It is more of a museum than a library, since we don’t get to touch stuff, but still cool in my books. Hehe. Heheheheheh. Books. Hehe. Anyway, the library was hosting a special exhibition on Emperor Maximilian I. He was the emperor of modern Austria in the 1400-1500 and this year was the 500th anniversary of his death so everything in the exhibition was relating to him. The room was very impressive with murals on the roof and it was satisfying to see all the shelves filled with old books. The books relating to Maximilian regarded his training and education including pictures of flowers, hand-to-hand combat techniques and hunting tips and techniques. There were also four old globes from that time that were interesting. Mainly to see how the world view has developed since. There was some highly valued pages and books that were written in gold text and displayed only for limited times. The most fascinating piece I found was a papal booklet from the Vatican showing Maximilian as an ideal leader for a crusade. Imagine getting something like that in the mail. The national library was a worthy visit and didn’t take hours to get through. From there we grabbed some dinner and headed for the train and the ride went smoothly back to our Grazian home.

Last note I’m not sure yet what day this is gonna post, but It’s probably around Easter, so happy Easter everyone.

Statue outside the library

Hand-to-hand combat book

The roof mural depicted different working orders and classes

Some musical notes

Finland found and looking pretty accurate