Winter Journey

Skiing with great friends and sightseeing and wine tasting and, importantly, avoiding crowds of tourists, in northern Italy.

Milano¹

Courmayeur²

Turin³

Piemonte⁴

Pop Quiz

The pictures below are depictions⁵ of St. George, patron saint of England⁶ and slayer of dragons, and the Archangel Michael, warrior of God who casts Satan out of Heaven. Do you know which is which? [Click on the pictures to see the answers.]

1. We purposely scheduled our trip so that we were leaving Milano just as the Olympics were starting. Crowds are not our thing, at all. ↩︎
2. Very much enjoyed the skiing. Courmayeur is not huge, but has lots of options for different types of skiing. We spent one day at La Thuile which was even better. ↩︎
3. No, we didn’t see the “shroud” as it is only displayed on special occasions. I was somewhat surprised when our guide told us that it is still an open question whether it could actually be the burial shroud of JC. I thought that had been debunked decades ago. ↩︎
4. We stayed in Alba, which has the greatest concentration of very good and affordable restaurants of any small town we have visited. ↩︎
5. I can honestly say that there was no-one with me in the galleries when I took these pictures. I mentioned previously that people taking pictures in busy galleries is incredibly annoying. Being alone with the art is one of the benefits of off-off-season tourism. ↩︎
6. Everyone wants a piece of George. He is also the patron for Georgia, the country not the US state; Catalonia, Aragon, Barcelona and various other Spanish towns, Portugal, and their colony Brazil; Bulgaria; Moscow; Bosnia; Kosovo; Montenegro; and Serbia. For most of my life, I never doubted that George’s dragon slaying adventures took place on English soil, or at least that the myths were an invention of the Brits. That changed about a decade ago when we visited Croatia and came across a large statue of George and his dragon in an Istrian church. I was very confused: why did the Croats erect a statue of an English saint? Of course it turns out that he wasn’t English at all. He was an actual person, likely of Syrian and/or Cappadocian descent, and a member of the Praetorian guard for roman emperor Diocletian. The facts of his life are uncertain and the history of his veneration as a saint is long and complex (dating back to the early 5th century). HIs association with England likely happened as a result of crusaders bringing his stories back from the holy land, although he was certainly known in England before that time. ↩︎