.

Massive shouts to Jim Gillette and Babystrangeways for being there.

Huge thankyou to scott for hooking us up when we were there.

Milan, what can you say about Milan? Except it's possibly one of the best cities in Europe. It's vast, it's busy, it’s warm, and it’s everything that Manchester hopes to be, all rolled into one. It was also the target on a weekend by me and my partners in crime Jim Gillette and babystrangeways.

We organised this trip to go and see one of our main men, who had moved over there to cause some trouble and further investigate their Metro system. It was this investigation that was the end of his Italian dream, and to cut a long story short, he sort of got caught investigating, and was promptly kicked straight out of Italy. This wasn't something we were going to let get us down. We pressed on, and got our tickets booked, and our dates set. We lost one man, but still we continued. Finally it was time.

I met up with JG in Manchester; we were both a fair bit excited about what lay ahead. A quick call to our female counterpart and the wheels were in motion. After seriously annoying a woman in a petrol station we drove to Liverpool airport, where we were met by a lovely sign stating that the parking would probably be much more than we planned for, and due to JG's poor research, we would more than likely have to part with double the money we had planned to. This wasn't going to get us down, we met up with babystrangeways and our first point of call was Burger King, where we said goodbye to horrible food for the weekend. We nailed security, hit the duty free shop and were soon on board our lovely Ryanair chariot. Next stop: Milan, Bergamo.

We landed to a wet, but warm Italian evening, found the coach, and an hour later we were stood next to the central station in Milan city centre. This place looked amazing!

We had to find our accommodation for the evening, and with a ragged map with a pen marking of where the unit was, we set out to find Via della Spiga. Around an hour of walking, and getting distracted, and finding babystrangeways' hostel, and we found the squat. We checked it out, and headed back out into the night, to ensure that BS got back OK. With that job sorted, myself and JG headed back, to get our heads down, it had been a long day.

Woken by pretty much anything that made a noise, we had the most on-edge sleep ever, but at around 9.30am the noise that woke us was most definitely something to be worried about. I was groggy, and didn't really know what was going on, but I was quickly informed by JG that there were, in fact, two Italian men in the building with us. Lovely stuff! We spoke to the guys who agreed to just let us walk away, as they had already called the police about someone living there, and they knew it wasn't us. We quickly packed up and left. In utter disbelief about how our day had started, we headed to the centre again to meet up with BS.
We headed for some food and for a walk around the city. We had a look around some sites that we wanted to look at, then myself and JG departed and went to have a look for some rooftops to play on.

Our first port of call was to become our home for the rest of the weekend. The Hotel Michelangelo stands tall just next to the central train station in Milan. It's not very pretty, but it's pretty tall, and offers some rather nice views over the city and into the distance to the Alps. We had a look around, took our photographs, and decided to leave. We took the decision to call it home, as it was nice and easy, and had minimal risk attached to it. We descended and within 10 minutes had crossed the square and were standing in front of Hotel Gallia.

Now, hotels are easy pickings no matter where you are. But we looked like tramps, and this was a 5 star hotel, that apparently is rather famous in the Italian hotel world, or whatever. Anyway, I reckoned we could, and didn't give JG much of a chance to argue, as I was running up the steps excitedly. With no trouble we were in the lift, in utter disbelief of how easy this was so far. Milan needs to step up its game! We found the roof and had a quick look, but, both agreeing that we were rather exposed on this roof, we opted to quickly get our pictures and leave. We ran back down, jumped in the lift and made our swift getaway. Me even saying ciao to the concierge! Brilliant.

We had another mooch, looking for sites we were interested in, and how to go about getting into them, and went to meet BS in the centre again, to get some food and have another look around.

This is where the days begin to get blurry. When you are spending literally a full day in a city doing a variety of different things, it is difficult to say afterwards when and where you did certain things. The memory is also affected. one thing I do remember is we ate something pretty nice, walked a hell of a lot, and we hit up a FANTASTIC little ice cream shop near Di Angeli Metro stop, and got some absolutely bang tidy ice cream for a few Euros.

At some point in this day I went mooching alone for a few hours while the guys rested. I hit up the Hilton, and the Four Point hotel, but I don't know what day it even was. Oh well...

We headed back to the centre, had a mooch round the Duomo, and the central Piazza again. By this time it was pretty late, so we headed off in our separate directions, and me and JG had another challenge - getting onto our hotel to sleep. This didn't prove too much of a problem, and in a matter of about 15 minutes we were all tucked up in our sleeping bags ready to get some well earned rest, ready for the next day. At this point, I have to tell you, that in the middle of the night, JG was woken up by voices and light. He was certain that we had been caught by hotel staff having a crafty smoke, or whatever. Regardless, these voices were right next to us, and he could see what he thought were cameras flashing. It turns out that these people weren't hotel staff, but in-fact some drunken tourists from Poland or somewhere like that, taking photos from the roof. They hadn't seen us though, which sort-of goes to show how amazing and hidden away our little spot under the roof crane was. My sleep was undisturbed by this and I woke up feeling rather fresh, compared to the sleepless night I’d had in the squat.

We met BS on time in the central square, and we went off again to have a look around. This time we travelled out on the Metro to San Siro stadium, to have a look around, and enjoy the sun some more. We had a look about, admired the extremely racist graffiti (I really don’t understand how the local authorities leave that stuff up!) and left for the metro, to get back to Milan. Skip forward a few hours and we were stood at the base of a huge building under construction, looking at potential access routes, which both JG and I had scoped out the previous day. This was our last night in the city, so we were going to make it count for sure!

We decided it was still a little too early to go wandering around this site, as it was overlooked by apartments, and there may be the usual headless chicken routine to try and find the way up, so we decided we would come back later on to have a fair old crack at this one. With that agreed we decided to have a quick look and agree on access for another large site that we had been admiring since we arrived. This site was HUGE. I would compare it to MediaCityUK in Manchester, but I would day the undeveloped area was probably the same again. The section of the site that held the main towers that were nearly topped out was our target, and access really couldn’t have been easier.

We scoped the street and were just discussing coming back a little later when we sort-of decided now was the time and went for the fence. We were being overlooked, it wasn’t very dark, and it was very open. We spotted some site supplies and some ducking and diving in and out of the shadows of these, and we were at the base of the concrete structure. We climbed in, and located some stairs, took them half way up where they stopped. We went across the site and found a second set of stairs, which luckily went as high as you could go. There we found a scaffold and a ladder, and within minutes we were at the top. WOW. This was amazing, standing there on the scaffold boards of the concrete section moulds for the walls of the building, we looked out over Milan. That view is certainly something that is going to stay with me. It was difficult to get any decent photos here, as the structure we were standing on was rocking about in the wind. We still managed to get a few, and we stayed up there a little longer, looking down onto the tops of cranes we would consider fairly large in Manchester.

We began our descent, which, as per usual took no time, we stopped to play about on some stuff and get some group shots. This was just too easy. No security, no cameras, no PIRs, all the things we see as being standard on a building site installation at home were nowhere to be seen in Italy. We hit the base of the building, surveyed our surroundings and started back on the same route we had used in. It was at one of our rest points that JG pointed out a man on a nearby apartment balcony stood watching us, with a phone pressed to his ear. Panic erupted in our group and split second decisions had to be made. We had no idea how long he had been there for, or how long he had been on the phone. Had he seen us on a higher floor? Had he seen us come in? Was he someone working on the site that was living next to it as part of the construction company? Who was he phoning? We didn’t know, and so agreed to assume the worst case scenario; that was that he had seen us some time ago, and the police were on the way.

Run. That was the only option at this late stage. We had to let go of our cover and bolt for the exit, which was well within sight, and about a 30 second sprint. We had no time to check for security, no time to check for anything, just head for the fence, and get onto the street. We did it, having to hurdle over steel and avoid obstacles clatter8ing about and making more noise than we would ever make, but we were out; disappearing into the Milanese night.

Walking back from that, I wanted to go back and check our little skyscraper. It had to be done, it’s by far the biggest structure, and this was our last night. What way to end a better trip?! I consulted JG and BS, but both were reluctant, as they were tired and thought perhaps we shouldn’t push our luck after our noisy escape from the previous site. I understood but still needed to have a go, I couldn’t live with myself knowing I’d walked away. A quick chat and some rearranging of the bags and gear and I was over the fence and into the fire door that we had spotted was open. This is where my plan quickly turned into a failure. I had entered a large unit that was separate to the main building itself, sort of like a large retail unit underneath an office block. I saw some plans on the wall, and sort of understood my location. I had adrenaline pumping through my body at this point but remained level-headed and decided to press on. I found my route and quickly referenced to the plans, and knew I would succeed if I could get to where I needed to be.

I darted across the room, trying to remain as silent as I could but everything was silent, and my legs being heavy caused my footsteps to be louder than usual. That coupled with the empty concrete room I was in did not help my predicament. I went through the lift room and to the outside of the site, next to a large glass window that looked out onto the main yard of the construction site. Oh, and also the security huts. I decided I had to try, so holding my breath I listened for any movement that might signal security were onto me. I could hear something that I dismissed as my mind playing tricks on me, just as I leant out to have a look before running I spotted someone. Not in the distance like usual, but stood no more than 6 feet away from me. He looked at me, and had a sort of puzzled look on his face, then shouted to me in fast Italian. I couldn’t even pick any of the words out of his sentence as I turned to run. I ran straight back out the way I came and back over the fence, then I advised JG and BS (who were still waiting outside for me) that we needed to leave fairly quickly.

As we made our way back to our rooftop bed I told them what had happened and we all agreed how lucky I was – had this been at home, I wouldn’t have bothered to check, just ran. We got back to the hotel roof, we lay talking about our weekend, and what we had achieved, and how good Milan was. I slept like a baby. The next morning, we woke up earlier, so as to avoid being spotted if any workmen were going to be on the roof – it was Monday morning after all! We went to grab some breakfast at a local café, and made our way to park. Here, we just sat out in the sun and chilled, enjoying our last day in this amazing city.

Milan, really… what can you say about Milan?

I know one thing for sure. I will not be a stranger!