The Lamborghini Museum, Pavia, and a Lovely Cascina Stay

This past Wednesday we took off early for another excursion. This time our destination was Expo 2015 in Milan.

Our first stop was the Lamborghini Museum. We tried to go there last year but it turned out with was closed for the afternoon for a special event. This year we had better luck.

This is the main floor of the exhibit area. There is also an upper area. It's not a large museum but interesting.

Lamborghini was involved in F1 racing for a while. Here is Dom peering intently at the car.

I am pretty sure this is a concept car but not all the exhibits have "labels."

This is a lovely car but I find it most intriguing that they hung it on the wall. Dom suggested we do that with his race care after it is painted. Why not?

This is another "unlabeled" model. It has a single seat but I could not figure out how one got into the cockpit.

I will take one of these. It's a four seater. Actually, at the Ferrari store in Milan I found my dream car, a Ferrari FF. It too is a four seat sedan and is also 4x4. 

Here is the back of the sedan. I wonder if you can fit a pair of skis in the trunk?

Don't ask me the model name...

Lamborghini also made boat engines.

This looks like it was based on the Hummer. However, the write-up about it claims it was a precursor to the modern SUV. It was first designed in the 70s so I suspect the Hummer might have borrowed from the Lamborghini design. It was never put into production.

As we were leaving, someone was going for a test drive. They don't actually let you drive the car, at least not at this point.

This video shows the test drive car pulling away. The driver is a factory employee so you think he would know how to shift. Apparently not if you wait until the very end.

From the Lamborghini Museum we drove to Pavia. It has a lovely covered bridge. Amazingly it actually carries two lanes of traffic.

Bad selfy!

A closer view of the bridge over the river Ticino.

 

Pavia had quite a few interesting vignettes viewed from the main streets.

Here is another.

We found the Pavia Duomo and went inside.

This was an interesting piece but of course nothing ever looks as good in photographs.

This bar had the most fascinating interior.

And then there were the pasticcieria windows

.

Times two!

We drove to the nearby Certosa di Pavia--an historical monastery that is still a monastery. We walked up to the gate and there were lots of signs saying no shorts, no sleeveless shirts. Both of us were in shorts and I had a sleeveless shirt on. Our car was nearby so we went back and changed out of the trunk!

It turned out no photography was allowed. However, I took this before I understood that. Oops! The entire complex is beautiful and well worth a visit if you are ever in the area.

I had made a reservation at Country House, not least because of the beautiful picture of the pool. It was lovely!

The entire complex was picturesque. This is the patio off the owners' kitchen. Our apartment was upstairs along the main road. It is all part of an old cascina complex nestled right in the midst of rice fields. 

Here is some information on cascine which you see all over the Po Valley:

A typical cascina is a square-yarded farm (sometimes having multiple yards) located at the centre of a large piece of cultivated land. Different types of brick-wall buildings are lined on the perimeter of the courtyard, which typically includes houses (usually a main house for the farm owner's or tenant's family, and simpler buildings for the peasants' families), stables, barns, pits and fountains, ovens, stores, mills and dairies. As most cascine were isolated, semi-autonomous settlements, with sometimes as much as one hundred inhabitants, many of them included public buildings such as churches, inns, or even schools. For the same reason, cascine were sometimes fortified structures, with defensive walls, towers, moats and drawbridges.

Cascine are found in most part of the Po Valley. Those from the High Po Valley (also known as the Dry Po Valley) are usually smaller and housed as much as 4-6 families, while those from the Low Po Valley easily reached 10-15 families of inhabitants or more (up to a maximum of 20-25).

Peasants working in the cascine, especially in large ones, had specialized jobs. For example, so-called "campari" were responsible for the maintenance of irrigation structures; "bergamini" looked after the cattle; "casari" worked in the dairy; "bifolchi" were responsible for ox-driven tillage (and "cavallanti" for horse-driven tillage); and "contadini" were factotum peasants, although their main task was that of harvesting hay for cattle feeding. In modern Italian language, most of these terms have fallen into disuse, with the exception of "contadini" (which has become the general term to refer to farmers) and "bifolchi" (which is only preserved in a derived, insulting meaning, similar to that of the English word "boor"). Of course, larger cascine also had carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, and other workers whose jobs were not directly related to agriculture or farming.

Production in the cascine of the Po Valley mainly consisted in wheat, maize, rice, barley, milk and cheese. Arboriculture was also common; cultivated trees included cottonwood,elm, and mulberry. Cascine located close enough to larger urban areas and cities (e.g. those in the Corpi Santi comune outside the walls of Milan) often specialized in cultivating fresh, perishable vegetables (e.g., cabbage or carrot), that were very profitable in urban markets.

(From the Wikipedia entry, Cascina a Corte--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascina_a_corte)