- Many of my friends thought I’d like Milan, so I planned to spend a week there during my Italy trip.
- I was underwhelmed and felt I’d seen enough of it after two days, but my hotel was booked for seven.
- So, I began using Milan as my home base and taking trains to other towns in Northern Italy.
In 2022, I spent five weeks traveling solo through Italy.
Throughout the trip, I took recommendations from others I knew who’d been to Italy. Friends told me I’d love Milan and had to stop there, especially since I love fashion.
After all, it’s one of the big fashion capitals in the world and one of the most popular tourist cities in Italy.
So, after spending three weeks in Rome, Venice, and Florence, I took a train to Milan, prepared to enjoy it as much as I had the other cities I’d spent time in.
Milan felt more cold and fast-paced than the other Italian cities I visited
Unfortunately, my trip to Milan was a low point in my five-week Italian journey.
It felt different from the other cities I visited, which were steeped in history and old-school charm. In Venice and Rome, historic monuments and architecture were everywhere I looked. In Milan, I saw a lot more modern buildings with colder, more severe designs.
On top of being a fashion hub, Milan is also the economic capital of Italy, which means it also houses many offices. At times, the city felt filled with the hustle and bustle of people rushing to get to and from work.
Milan famously has a lot of great shops, from department stores to high-end boutiques, but I wasn’t fully won over. The stores felt busier than any I’d gone to in other cities.
Although the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II shopping center was architecturally beautiful, the many tourists crowding through it took away from my experience.
Don’t get me wrong: Milan isn’t a bad place to visit. I had wonderful food here and especially loved seeing its beautiful Duomo, one of Italy’s largest cathedrals.
However, I felt I had seen plenty and was ready to leave the city after just two days. There was just one problem — I’d booked my hotel for a whole week, and it was too late to cancel.
I needed to find a way to pivot and save my trip, ideally without losing money on my hotel reservation.
I spent the rest of my trip using Milan as my home base while taking trains to other towns
Fortunately, Milan is home to one of Italy’s biggest train stations.
My new plan was to spend the rest of my trip sleeping in Milan at night while taking trains to smaller nearby towns during the day.
First, I took the train to Brescia, about an hour away from Milan. My visit to the small town immediately turned my entire trip around.
Brescia was great to explore on foot. The architecture was lovely, and the historic sites weren’t super busy. The locals were friendly and gave me great recommendations for churches to visit and places to eat.
I also went to Modena, just over two hours from Milan by train.
I got to view local churches and visit Galeria Estensi, an art museum located in a building with historic funerary monuments. The museum was so quiet, even in June. Only four other people were in the gallery in the three hours I was there.
My favorite day trip was to Parma, about an hour from Milan by train. It’s home to the Galeria Pilotta, an extensive art and culture museum housed in a palazzo with large arches and a massive public square.
The town felt charming, and the walk between the gallery and the train station features a long walking path by a waterway that I tackled in an afternoon.
Visiting small towns in Northern Italy saved my trip
For me, staying in Milan but spending most of the week traveling outside of it was the perfect way to pivot my trip.
Train travel in Italy is pretty cheap — most one-way tickets were under $20 — and it’s a pretty great way to travel. I was also able to see a lot of places I might not have visited otherwise.
The small towns I visited felt far less crowded than Milan and were still walkable. I liked how I could easily stroll from one attraction to another and get through most of each city’s highlights in a day.
If you like historic sites, museums and a quieter vacation with incredible views, skip Milan and visit the small towns nearby instead.
Or, at least, add some of them to your itinerary after you check out Milan. You won’t be disappointed.
