Back to the blog - First post in months after visits to Marengo and Milan!!!

Well, it has been a busy few months. A promotion in one job and the other job getting busy as well, on top of some ongoing health issues, has meant that my hobby time has been limited. Adding on the fact that I'm so easily distracted (15mm Punic Wars Roman and Numidian armies almost finished, plus a 15mm Thirty Year's War project started - A Spanish Tercio of 52 figures presently completed) has meant that this blog has been severely neglected.

But the summer holidays have helped get me back on track. A family holiday to a little town in Italy called Carbonara Scrivona put me within a 20 minute drive of Marengo. I managed to convince the family the Marengo Museum was worth a visit. The youngest kids liked it, the teenage daughter was bored before we left the house, and my wife tried her best to look uninterested, but her interest in art, history and architecture won her over.

I took quite a few photos at the museum. There's not much else to see, unless you are willing to wander the local fields, and the weather was extremely hot - not what we're used to in Scotland. In the museum there were lots of exhibits of interest, from models, paintings, replica uniforms and flags. I'll be posting a few over the few days and look at each thing in a bit more detail.

After that holiday we had a few weeks back home until this weekend where myself and my wife had a couple of days in Milan to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. We did the usual holiday of walking all day and visiting as many galleries and museums as possible. On our last day we visited the Galleria d'Arte Moderna Milano, situated in the Villa Reale which was built in 1790-96 and was used as a residence by Napoleon on his visits to Milan.

I had expected mostly modern art but was pleasantly surprised to find many paintings of interest to the Napoleonic enthusiast. These included "Ritratto del maresciallo austraco marchese Annibale Sommariva" painted in 1800 and "Napoleone Bonoparte alla battaglia del ponte di Lodi" from 1800-01.

I still need to download all the photos, run them through photoshop to crop and resize them, then get them all onto photobucket. I have about 80-90 pictures to sort through, but will post them over the next week or so.