I have stood in front of it twice at the British Museum in London, six years apart, and both times went the same way. I spotted the case from the door. I joined the crowd around it and waited. I edged forward. And when I finally reached the glass there were people at my shoulder, people behind me, and my own reflection lying across two thousand years of carved text like a stain. Then I took a photograph I already knew was going to be bad, and I moved, because somebody else had been waiting exactly as long as I had.

The glare is the other half of it. The case throws back the gallery lights, the windows, the crowd, everything. In one of my photographs a human silhouette is printed across the middle of the inscription, dead centre, like a shadow puppet. That is not a bad photograph of the Rosetta Stone. That is an accurate one.

The Rosetta Stone at a Glance
🪨 What it is · A broken slab of granodiorite carved with a single decree in 196 BC, written three times: hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek. The Greek was the crib that let scholars finally read the other two.
🔑 Why it matters · The three-script repetition let Jean-François Champollion crack hieroglyphs in 1822, after they had been unreadable for roughly 1,400 years. Egyptology begins there.
📍 Where to find it · Room 4, the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery, on the main axis facing the entrance. It is the British Museum’s most visited object, so it is easy to find and hard to reach.
🎟️ Cost · Free. A timed ticket booked online speeds up entry at the gate.
💡 Tip · Go at opening or after about three in the afternoon, head straight to Room 4, and shoot the case slightly off-square to fight the glare.

What is actually in the case

The stone itself is a broken slab of grey granodiorite, chest height, with its top corner sheared away and a bite out of one side. It is not beautiful and it is not trying to be. It is a piece of government paperwork.

The text is a decree issued on 27 March 196 BC, in the name of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, a boy king of Egypt’s Greek dynasty. Egyptian priests agreed to establish a royal cult in return for concessions to their temples, and the decree was cut into stone and set up in a temple. What makes it the most famous rock in Britain is that they wrote it out three times: hieroglyphs at the top, Demotic in the middle, Greek at the bottom. The same words, three scripts.

That repetition is the whole point. Hieroglyphs had been unreadable for something like fourteen hundred years. Nobody could hear ancient Egypt speak. Because scholars could read the Greek, the stone became a crib: Thomas Young made real progress on it, and Jean-François Champollion, using his knowledge of Coptic as a surviving descendant of the Egyptian language, announced in September 1822 that he had cracked it. Egyptology begins there. Every tomb inscription, every papyrus, every temple wall that anyone has read since traces back through this slab.

All of which is easier to describe than to see. The three bands are perfectly clear in a photograph taken in a studio, with no glass, no lights and nobody’s shoulder in the way. Standing in Room 4, they are a grey blur behind a reflection of my own coat.

The label that changed

Here is something I only noticed because I am a person who photographs museum labels. I have a picture of the interpretation panel from my first visit and another from my second, and in the six years between them the British Museum changed what it says.

The older panel called the stone “the only surviving fragment” of the larger slab it was broken from. The newer one does not. It calls it simply “the fragment”, and adds that the Rosetta Stone was the first such decree to be found, but that others have since been excavated and more are still being discovered.

That is a small edit and a large one. The stone’s aura has always rested a little on being unique: the one lucky survivor, the single key. It is not the only copy of that decree. It is the first one found, and the one that did the work.

Which is a decent reminder that labels are not carved in stone, whatever the object standing behind them happens to be. They are written out of what is known at the time, and what is known keeps moving. I only caught it because I photographed the same wall twice, six years apart.

The gallery nobody looks at

The other thing the crowd does is hide the room. Room 4 is the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery, and it is full of colossal stone: pharaohs’ heads the size of armchairs, torsos on plinths, granite faces looking over everyone’s heads at the far wall. Most visitors walk straight down the middle of it to reach a decree about tax concessions, photograph the decree, and walk out again.

Which is fair enough. But the stone sits in that room for a reason, and the reason is standing all around it. Ancient Egyptian art is soaked in writing. There is almost nothing in the gallery that does not carry an inscription. The stone is the key, and the room is the locked door it opens.

How it got here, and who wants it back

The stone was found in July 1799 by French soldiers at Rashid, in the Nile Delta, during Napoleon‘s Egyptian campaign. The French called the town Rosetta and the name stuck. When British forces defeated the French, the stone and a number of other antiquities passed to Britain under the Treaty of Alexandria in 1801, and it has been in the British Museum since 1802.

That history is now the argument. Egyptian campaigners have called for the stone’s return for years, and the case has sharpened since the Grand Egyptian Museum opened at Giza. Zahi Hawass, formerly Egypt’s antiquities minister, has run a petition gathering well over a hundred thousand signatures; a second, organised by the Egyptologist Monica Hanna, argues that the stone was taken illegally and amounts to a spoil of war. Hanna has described the museum’s continued possession as a symbol of cultural violence against Egypt. The broader case is one of decolonisation: that objects removed while Egypt was under foreign control belong at home, and that Egypt now has a world-class museum to put them in.

The British Museum’s answers run on two tracks. On the history, it points out that the 1801 treaty carries the signature of a representative of Egypt, which cuts against the claim that Egypt had no say. On the present, it says it has had no formal request from the Egyptian government, and as of late 2025 the current antiquities minister had not publicly called for the stone’s return, which leaves the campaigns as public pressure rather than a state claim. There is also a legal wall behind both: the British Museum Act largely prevents the museum from giving objects away, so even a willing board could not simply hand it over without Parliament changing the law. A petition asking Parliament to amend that Act has been lodged.

I am not going to pretend to settle that in a travel post. But it is worth knowing while standing at the glass that the argument is live, that it is not a fringe position, and that the queue shuffling past is looking at an object whose ownership a great many people dispute.

Going back

I did not do this properly. Both times I arrived mid-visit, mid-crowd, mid-museum, and gave the most consequential object in the building about four minutes because that was what the press of people allowed. I would like to go back and stand there without a shoulder in my ribs, and read the three scripts down the face slowly, and look at what the room is holding around it.

Next time: doors at opening, straight to Room 4, and everything else afterwards.

Bubbly Tips

• Go at opening or late afternoon. The stone is busiest through the middle of the day. Arrive when the doors open, or after about three in the afternoon, and the crowd around the case thins noticeably.
• Go to it first, not on your way round. Room 4 is a short walk from the main entrance: through the Great Court and follow the signs for Egyptian Sculpture. If the stone is the thing you came for, do it before the museum fills up rather than saving it for later.
• Entry is free. The British Museum does not charge admission, so seeing the Rosetta Stone costs nothing. A free timed ticket booked online can save queueing at the gate at busy times.
• Shoot at an angle to beat the glare. The case reflects the lights, the windows and everyone standing behind you. Get the lens close to the glass and shoot slightly off square, and accept that a clean shot may not be possible.
• Read the panel, not just the stone. The interpretation panel beside the case explains the three scripts better than the label does, and it is far easier to get near than the stone itself.
• Look at the room, not only the case. Room 4 is the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery, full of colossal granite, and nearly everything in it is inscribed. Turn round once you have had your look.
• Pair it with the Chessmen upstairs. Room 40 holds the Lewis Chessmen, and Room 41 the Sutton Hoo treasures, both on the upper floor. The three together make a strong half-day.
• Do not expect to be alone with it. This is the most visited object in the museum. Even at the quietest hour there will be people. Plan for a look rather than a communion.
• Check before a special trip. The stone has left Room 4 before, most recently for a major exhibition. If it is the reason for your visit, glance at the museum’s website first.

Final Thoughts

The Rosetta Stone is a strange sort of celebrity. It is a grey broken slab of tax law, put up by priests to flatter a boy king, and by any ordinary measure it is the least lovely famous object in London. And yet it is the one everyone walks to first, because of what happened to it seventeen centuries later: a stubborn Frenchman with a good ear for Coptic looked at three columns of text and gave a civilisation back its own voice.

That is worth the queue, even a bad one. But it deserves better than four minutes and a photograph of my own reflection, and next time it is getting a proper look. Doors at opening, no shoulder in my ribs, and a proper long look at the most important rock I am ever likely to stand in front of.

Until next time!

The post Trying to See the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum appeared first on Bubbly Living.

There is a catch, and it is the same one I ran into in Paris. On a non-European passport, the border queue can swallow the very hours the lounge is meant to fill. Clear it early, though, and what is left is worth the effort.

The KLM Crown Lounge 52 at a Glance
🏠 Five thousand houses · Around 5,000 Delft Blue miniature houses line the escalator walls at the entrance, backed by mirrors that double the count. Each is a wax-sealed bottle of Bols jenever.
🗺️ Five Dutch landscapes · Redesigned by the Amsterdam studio concrete and reopened in 2019, the lounge splits into Polder, City, Dutch Mountain, Sea and Sky, each themed to a piece of Dutch terrain.
🎫 Who gets in · KLM or SkyTeam business class, Flying Blue Gold or Platinum, or SkyTeam Elite Plus, each with one guest. Paid entry is also available, usually from three hours before departure.
⏰ When and where · The non-Schengen Lounge 52 sits between the E and F concourses and opens daily 04:45 to 22:00.
💡 Tip · On a non-EU passport, clear the border first. The queue can eat the very hours the lounge is meant to fill.

The little houses

The first thing the lounge offers is not a seat or a drink. It is a wall of houses. Two escalators carry passengers up from the concourse, and the walls on either side are packed with small blue and white ceramic houses on individual shelves, backed with mirrors so that they repeat away into the distance. There are about five thousand of them in the building. People stop on the moving stairs to photograph them, which does not make the escalator any faster.

They are Delft Blue miniatures, made in the Netherlands, and each one is a bottle. Inside is Bols jenever, Dutch gin, sealed with wax.

The reason they exist at all is a good story. In 1952, American rules barred airlines from handing passengers tangible gifts, on the grounds that it distorted competition. KLM wanted to give its long-haul customers something anyway, so it filled little ceramic houses with gin and argued that this was not a gift at all but a drink to take away, pointing out that no law required a drink to be served in a glass. The loophole held. Seventy years later the houses are collected, traded and hunted, and a new one still appears each October.

One correction to a thing I had assumed for years: they are not for sale here. They are given to passengers flying long-haul business class, one per person, and the lounge simply holds the full run on show. What the lounge does have is a wider choice than any aircraft can carry, and staff who will swap a duplicate for something the collection is missing.

None of which stops the airport selling houses. The shops downstairs are full of blue and white canal houses in the same palette and the same gabled silhouette, and they are not these. They are generic Delft souvenirs, which is a perfectly nice thing to be, but the resemblance is skin deep. The official ones carry a number on the base and a stamp saying they were made for KLM by Bols. No number and no KLM, no KLM house.

The polder

The lounge was rebuilt by the Amsterdam design practice concrete and reopened at the end of the 2010s, and it is split into five zones, each named for a piece of Dutch landscape: Polder, City, Dutch Mountain, Sea and Sky. This is not marketing draped over a room. The zones look different from one another and they are laid out to be used differently.

The Polder is the working, dozing half of the ground floor. Its carpet runs in shades of green, standing in for the reclaimed grazing land the area is named after, and long benches with planting built into them break the space into smaller pockets. Along the wall, a strip of LED light imitates the Dutch sky and shifts through the day, sunset included.

And there are sheep. Not real ones, obviously, but stuffed and standing about on the green carpet as though the pasture were doing its job. They are made from old KLM uniforms, which is the sort of detail that turns a decorating decision into a joke worth catching. There is a pig too. Agricultural landscape, agriculturally furnished.

The Dutch Mountain

The Netherlands is famously flat, so the staircase between the two floors is called the Dutch Mountain, and it is built to be sat on rather than merely climbed. Wide wooden steps rise past landings, tall cabinets of Dutch design, and a mirror ball. At the top there is a DJ booth, which is either a delight or an outrage depending on the hour of the layover.

The best thing in the lounge sits at the top of those stairs, and most people walk straight past it. It is a large panel of blue and white Delft tiles, and the images on them are taken from KLM’s safety video. Brace positions, life jackets, seat belts and oxygen masks, all rendered in the same blue as a seventeenth-century kitchen wall. It is the funniest object in the building and it is also, quietly, the most Dutch.

KLM’s own museum

Along the windows, glass cabinets hold pieces from the airline’s archive. Model aircraft in old liveries, one of them cut away down its length to show rows of tiny passengers in their seats, sit beside vintage suitcases and posters from decades of KLM advertising. It is a small, unhurried museum that happens to have a runway outside it.

Food, drink and the bar upstairs

The City zone is the noisy middle of the ground floor, and it is where the food is. Kitchens cook to order in the open, a barista works a proper coffee bar, and there is a Heineken bar walled in copper. The catering comes from KLM’s partner Vermaat and leans seasonal.

I am rarely hungry off a red-eye, so I cannot pretend to have worked through it, but the spread is wide and the drinks selection wider, with Bols jenever on the shelf, as it should be.

One thing to know before climbing the stairs hungry: the restaurant and bar on the upper floor, both called Blue, are not included. They are paid, and the menu there was composed by Joris Bijdendijk, the chef behind RIJKS, the Rijksmuseum’s Michelin-starred restaurant. The bar counter runs fifteen metres and is lit from beneath.

Somewhere to work

What I actually come for is the quiet. Long wooden counters run along the edges of the lounge with power sockets set into them every few places, stools tucked underneath, and enough distance between one person and the next to spread out without apologising. The lounge is large enough to absorb a crowd, so even on a busy morning there is usually a corner going spare.

The quietest zone is Sea, at the far end, where the carpet turns deep blue and the fittings are built for recovering rather than working. Showers are there, and sleep cabins, though the cabins are charged for.

Getting in

Access runs by cabin or status. A KLM or SkyTeam business or business class ticket qualifies, as does Flying Blue Gold or Platinum, or SkyTeam Elite Plus on any SkyTeam flight, each with one guest. Paid entry exists but comes with a real caveat: KLM only sells it off-peak, when the lounge is not already full with passengers who have access by right, and the price moves rather than sitting at a fixed figure. It is not something to build a plan around.

Bubbly Tips

• Clear the border first, then relax. On a non-EU passport the queue at Schiphol can run long, and every minute in it is a minute not spent upstairs. Build in a buffer and the lounge stops being a consolation prize.
• Follow the signs for Lounge 52. It is the non-Schengen lounge, sitting between the E and F concourses, and it opens daily from 04:45 until 22:00. The way in is an escalator and a boarding pass scan.
• Off-peak is when it is roomy. Mid-morning it can be heaving, and reviewers regularly report struggling for a seat. Early, late or off the main departure banks is when the space works as intended.
• Head up the Dutch Mountain. The staircase is designed to be sat on, and the upper floor is calmer than the ground. If the Polder is full, go up rather than circling.
• Find the safety-video tiles. At the top of the staircase, behind the DJ booth, a wall of Delft tiles reproduces KLM’s safety instructions in blue and white. It is the best thing in the lounge and almost nobody stops.
• The bar and restaurant upstairs are extra. Blue is a paid restaurant and bar with a menu by the chef behind the Rijksmuseum’s Michelin-starred RIJKS. The food downstairs in City is included; upstairs is not.
• Ask about your house. If you are flying long-haul business and were handed a duplicate Delft house, reception holds a wider selection than the aircraft carries and will usually swap it.
• Sea is for sleeping, not typing. The far blue zone has the showers and the sleep cabins, and it is the quietest part of the lounge. The cabins cost extra; the quiet does not.
• Do not count on buying your way in. Paid access is sold off-peak only and subject to space, at a price that shifts. Check the KLM app on the day rather than assuming.

Final Thoughts

Most airport lounges are a chair and a rescued hour. This one is a building with opinions: a fake mountain, a fake pasture with fake sheep in it, five thousand gin-filled houses stacked up the walls, and a wall of Delft tiles patiently explaining how to brace for impact. Somebody thought hard about all of it, and then thought about it a bit longer, and the result is a room I am pleased rather than resigned to be stuck in.

It has ruined a few other lounges for me, which is the risk. And it has done something odder still, which is to make me want to leave the airport. All those little gabled houses lined up against a photograph of the real thing are hard to look at for two hours without wondering about the canal they came from. Amsterdam proper is next.

Until next time!

The post Five Thousand Little Houses: The KLM Crown Lounge at Schiphol appeared first on Bubbly Living.

I need not have worried. The cast delivered, all four of them, and then the film did something I had not seen coming at all. It went to Milan. And because I had been to Milan myself, I spent a good part of the running time sitting up straighter, saying some version of “I stood right there” to nobody in particular.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 in Milan at a Glance
🎬 Where it filmed · The Milan act was shot through autumn 2025, partly during Milan Fashion Week. Real locations include the Duomo, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, and the courtyard of the Palazzo di Brera, which stands in for Runway’s fashion show.
⛪ The Last Supper is a replica · The gala scene at Santa Maria delle Grazie was not shot in front of the real Leonardo. It is far too fragile, so the production built the refectory on a soundstage, mural and all.
🏰 Free to walk into · The Duomo square, the Galleria and the Sforza Castle courtyards all cost nothing. The Brera courtyard is free too. Tickets are only for the cathedral roof, the Pinacoteca and the Last Supper.
🚤 The Lake Como villa · The lakeside house is the 16th-century Villa Balbiano, on the western shore near Ossuccio, which also appeared in House of Gucci.
💡 Tip · Book the Last Supper months ahead. Entry is timed, capped and just fifteen minutes, and slots sell out weeks in advance.

Twenty years later

The setup, briefly and without giving too much away. Andy Sachs is laid off when her newspaper folds, and she comes back to Runway as its features editor. Miranda Priestly is fighting for a print empire that the industry has rather moved on from. Emily has become a serious player at a luxury brand. David Frankel directs again and Aline Brosh McKenna writes again, and Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci are all back, with Kenneth Branagh, Simone Ashley, Justin Theroux and Lucy Liu joining them.

Where the first film sent the Runway team to Paris, this one sends them to Milan. The crew shot there through the autumn of 2025, partly during Milan Fashion Week, with the Italian design houses lending their support. The reviews came in generally positive, the film took nearly seven hundred million dollars worldwide, and its opening weekend beat the original’s by a wide margin. It reached cinemas in May and landed on streaming in the summer.

The Duomo

Milan arrives in the film the way it arrives in real life, all at once. The camera sweeps over the skyline and drops towards the cathedral, and there it is: the Duomo, that pale marble thicket of spires in the middle of the city. It is the first thing the film shows of Italy and it is the correct choice, because there is nothing else in Milan that does what it does.

I saw it first on a bright, hot afternoon, in a Piazza del Duomo so full of people that reaching the steps took a while. The marble is not white. Up close it carries a faint pink cast, and it changes with the light through the day.

The Galleria

A few steps north of the cathedral stands the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, and this is where the film really lingers. Miranda takes a solitary walk through the arcade, past the flagship windows, which is a neat piece of scene-setting given that one of those windows belongs to Prada and the film has its name in the title.

From the piazza, the entrance is a monumental stone arch with a dedication carved across it. I remember stopping to read it before going in.

Inside, it is a covered street rather than a shopping centre, and the crowd moves through it in both directions at once. The glass roof is the whole point. Light pours down onto the mosaic floor, the boutique signs sit under stone caryatids, and every few metres somebody stops dead to photograph the ceiling, which is exactly what I did.

Down on the floor of the octagon, set into the mosaic, is the coat of arms of Turin with its bull. Tradition says a heel planted on the bull and three turns will bring luck, or, depending on who is telling it, a return to Milan. So many people have done it that the tiles wear through and have to be repaired every few years. I did it. Given that I am now planning a second trip, perhaps it worked.

The piazza after dark

The film catches the piazza after dark too, in glimpses, lit and gleaming as the story passes through it. That was the version I recognised most, because it is the one I had liked best: the square late at night, long after the crowds have gone home.

Out in the middle of the square at that hour, both landmarks line up together, the arch of the Galleria on one side and the cathedral on the other, lit up and almost unattended. It is the same view the film opens on, minus the helicopter and the crowd.

The castle in the aerial sweep

The Castello Sforzesco (Sforza Castle) goes past in a blink during that opening sweep, but it is there, a great red brick square with its tower in the middle of the city. It is not a filming location, so far as I can tell, just a few seconds of Milan seen from above. I noticed it because I had walked through it.

At ground level it is the scale that lands. The main gate leads into a parade ground so large that the crowds thin out inside it, and beyond that lies Parco Sempione.

The fashion show at Palazzo di Brera

Runway’s fashion show, the set piece the whole Milan act builds towards, was shot in the courtyard of the Palazzo di Brera. The palazzo stands on Via Brera, about fifteen minutes north of the cathedral, and from the street it gives almost nothing away. Behind the door is a courtyard of honour: two storeys of arcades running round a stone square, Doric columns below, Ionic above, and a bronze Napoleon standing in the middle of it all.

The building is worth knowing about beyond the film. Since the 1770s it has held an unlikely number of institutions at once, and it still does. The Accademia di Belle Arti, the fine arts academy founded in 1776, works out of it. So does the Pinacoteca di Brera, the picture gallery that grew out of the Academy’s own teaching collection and now hangs Raphael, Mantegna, Bellini and Caravaggio. There is a national library in there too, along with an astronomical observatory and a botanical garden. Academy and gallery are separate institutions sharing one address and one courtyard, which is why that courtyard gets called by both their names.

Lady Gaga stole it

That courtyard is also where Lady Gaga performs. She turns up as the musical guest at Runway’s fashion week show and walks off with the film. She shot her scenes in Milan in October 2025, in the middle of her own Mayhem Ball tour, which is a level of stamina I cannot begin to imagine.

I have never doubted that she can sing. Her acting had already convinced me in House of Gucci. What I had not expected was how much of the film’s music would be hers. She has three original songs on the soundtrack, all of which she had a hand in writing: “Shape of a Woman”, which is the one she performs on screen, “Glamorous Life”, and the lead single “Runway”, a duet with Doechii built for a dance floor and co-written with Bruno Mars, Andrew Watt, Cirkut and D’Mile among others. “Runway” went to number one on Billboard’s Dance Digital Song Sales chart and into the top fifty of the Hot 100. The beats are terrific. Her performance is the part of the film I would rewatch first.

The rest of the soundtrack deserves a mention too, because it is an all-female line-up: Dua Lipa, Miley Cyrus, SZA, Laufey, Olivia Dean, Raye, Ledisi and more, alongside newcomers writing original songs for the film.

The gala at Santa Maria delle Grazie

The film’s gala dinner is set at Santa Maria delle Grazie, the Dominican church and convent west of the centre. It is a low red brick building with a tall drum and dome at one end, and on the north wall of its old refectory hangs the most famous painting in Milan.

The dinner was not filmed in there, and it could not have been. Leonardo da Vinci‘s Last Supper covers that refectory wall, and it is far too fragile to host a film crew and a banquet, so the production built a replica of the room on a studio set, painting and all, and shot the scene in that.

The real thing has been living on borrowed time from the start. Leonardo worked in tempera and oil on dry plaster rather than true fresco, and the experiment began failing almost at once. Allied bombing in the Second World War took the roof off the refectory, and the wall came through it sandbagged and lucky.

Getting in front of it is a small operation. The refectory has its own entrance and its own ticket, separate from the church, and visitors go in in small groups for exactly fifteen minutes before the doors move them along. The church itself is free.

What I am going back for

Here is what the film did to me. It sent me straight to my own photographs, and then it made me want to book another trip, because the Milan it shows is not quite the Milan I saw.

The Runway team stays at the Palazzo Parigi, a five-star hotel on Corso di Porta Nuova in the centre of the city, and I would like to at least have a drink in it. There is a fashion event at the Villa Arconati, a grand estate at Castellazzo, northwest of Milan, with formal gardens and painted staircases, sometimes called the Versailles of Lombardy, opened to the public in recent years. And the story slips out of the city altogether to Lake Como, where a sixteenth-century villa stands in as a tech billionaire’s Italian home.

Mostly, though, it made me want to go back to Milan itself. Not for the film locations. Just for Milan.

Bubbly Tips

• Watch the first film again before this one. Twenty years is a long gap, and the sequel rewards you for remembering the details. It also makes the returning characters land harder.
• Go to the piazza twice, once in daylight and once late. The daytime Duomo is the one everybody photographs. The one at midnight, lit and nearly empty, is the one you will remember.
• Look for the bull, then look up. In the Galleria’s central octagon, find the Turin coat of arms in the floor and spin three times on your heel for luck. Then stop and look at the dome, which most people walk straight under.
• The Galleria is free and always open. It is a public passage, not a shop, so you can walk through and photograph it at any hour. Late evening is the calm version.
• Give the Sforza Castle a couple of hours. The grounds and courtyards are free to enter and worth it on their own. The museums are ticketed, and they hold Michelangelo‘s last sculpture, the Rondanini Pietà.
• The Duomo terraces are a separate ticket. Getting inside the cathedral and getting onto the roof are two different tickets. If you only do one, the roof puts you among the spires.
• The Brera courtyard is free to walk into. The Palazzo di Brera’s courtyard, the one the fashion show is shot in, costs nothing and is open to anyone who walks through the door on Via Brera. The Pinacoteca upstairs is a separate ticket, and worth it.
• Book the Last Supper months ahead, and expect fifteen minutes. Tickets are timed, capped and released in batches, and they go fast. The refectory entrance is not the church door. Non-flash photography is allowed, but the clock does not stop for it.
• Milan Fashion Week is glamorous and impossible. The film shot during it. If you want the city rather than the circus, avoid those weeks, when hotel prices climb and the centre fills up.

Final Thoughts

I went in worried that a sequel arriving twenty years late would trade on nostalgia and little else. Instead I got Streep and Hathaway back on form, Gaga rewriting the film’s pulse for three songs, and a whole act set in a city I had walked through, photographed, and thought I was finished with.

That last part is the odd gift of it. Films usually make you want to go somewhere new. This one sent me back through my own pictures of the Duomo and the Galleria, and then made me want to return to the same square and stand in it again, this time with a hotel bar and a villa or two on the list. Twenty years for a sequel; barely twenty minutes of screen time to talk me into a second trip.

Until next time!

The post The Devil Wears Prada 2 and the Milan I Had Already Walked appeared first on Bubbly Living.

What London holds turned out to be five paintings, and they are not a greatest-hits set. One is a world-famous showstopper. The others are quieter, stranger, and in a couple of cases genuinely surprising, and together they trace Van Gogh across the last, hardest years of his life. One of them, as it happens, has been leaning against my wall at home in LEGO form for months.

Van Gogh at the National Gallery at a Glance
🖼️ Eight works, one room · The National Gallery holds eight paintings by Vincent van Gogh. Seven of them hang together in Room 43 on Level 2. The eighth, Head of a Peasant Woman, is not currently on display.
🌻 The Sunflowers is away · London’s 1888 Sunflowers is on loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art until 11 October 2026. Check the Gallery website before you plan a day around it.
🏛️ Owned and borrowed · The Gallery owns the Sunflowers, Van Gogh’s Chair, A Wheatfield with Cypresses and Long Grass with Butterflies. Two Crabs and Landscape with Ploughman are private loans. Farms near Auvers belongs to Tate.
🎟️ Free to walk in · General admission costs nothing. A free timed ticket gets you through faster. Open daily 10am to 7pm, Fridays until 9pm.
💡 Tip · Room 43 is busiest around midday. Come at opening or in the last hour, and the quieter four Van Goghs will often be yours alone.

Through the Christmas crowds

The National Gallery was dressed for Christmas the day I went, with tall lit trees under the great glass dome and what seemed like half of London moving through the rooms. I threaded my way up through the marble hall and towards the Post-Impressionists, where the crowd only thickened. The Van Gogh room was the busiest of the lot, and it was not hard to guess which painting was pulling everyone in.

The Sunflowers

The Sunflowers is the painting everyone comes for, and the crowd in front of it proved the point. I waited my turn, behind a row of raised phones, to reach the front. It is smaller than the reproductions suggest and far more alive up close, the petals built up in thick ridges of paint that stand off the canvas and catch the light.

Van Gogh painted it in Arles in August 1888, in a burst of hope. Gauguin had agreed to come and stay at the Yellow House, and Van Gogh wanted the walls covered in sunflowers to welcome him. He dreamed of a whole series, as many as a dozen panels, the effect of the room “a symphony in blue and yellow”, and he hung the best of them in the little room his guest would use. He was proud enough of this one to sign it, “Vincent”, in blue on the belly of the vase. The optimism did not survive the winter. Within a couple of months the two men had fallen out badly and Gauguin had gone, but the flowers still carry the warmth of the autumn they were painted in.

It is also the painting I know best, because a LEGO version of it has been leaning against my wall at home for months.

There is one catch worth knowing for anyone planning a visit around it. The Sunflowers is not always in London. At the time of writing it is away on loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, so it is worth checking what is actually on the wall before making a special trip.

Two Crabs

The real surprise of the room was two crabs. I had no idea Van Gogh ever painted crabs, and there they were, one flipped on its back with its pale underside and legs in the air, the other upright, both set against a churning green ground. It held me longer than almost anything else in the room.

He painted the study in the first weeks of 1889, back in Arles, just after a spell in hospital. That was the winter he had cut off part of his ear, in the crisis that ended the Gauguin experiment, and coming out the other side he wrote to his brother Theo that he would ease himself back into work with a still life or two. The crabs were among the first things he made.

The title is a little misleading. The two are near-identical, and a companion painting of a single crab on its back hangs in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, clearly of a piece with this one. There is even a small mystery about the date: the National Gallery places this canvas in Arles in 1889, while the Amsterdam museum dates its version to Paris two years earlier, and the specialists have not fully settled it. What is not in doubt is the debt to the Japanese prints Van Gogh collected obsessively. He had admired a crab print by Hokusai, and the flat colour and springing black outlines here owe a great deal to it, with a nod as well to the animal studies of old European masters like Dürer.

Some people read a mood into the upturned crab, helpless on its back so soon after his breakdown. It is a tempting line, though Van Gogh left no such note himself, and it is easy to load his work with more meaning than he ever intended.

Landscape with Ploughman

A few steps along, the mood changes completely. Landscape with Ploughman is a small, dense field scene from Saint-Rémy, in Provence, where Van Gogh spent the year after Arles. In May 1889, worn down by his breakdowns, he had checked himself into the psychiatric hospital there of his own accord. This is the view from his window: a farmer and horse turning dark furrows at dawn, a house and pale hills beyond, the whole field ridged with the same restless strokes as the sky above it.

He saw himself in the labourer. That autumn he wrote to his mother that he was “ploughing on my canvases as they do in their fields”, and the hardworking figure bent to the soil reads plainly as a portrait of the painter at his own easel. Fields and farm workers run all through his late work, but here the connection is unusually direct, a man tied to the turning of the seasons, making something out of hard ground.

Van Gogh’s Chair

Van Gogh’s Chair is one of only two paintings in this group the Gallery owns rather than borrows, and the pairing is a neat one: it and the Sunflowers were the first two Van Goghs the National Gallery ever bought, acquired together in 1924. The other three here are all loans. The Chair is also the quietest of the five, and in some ways the saddest: a single empty chair. It is plain wood painted yellow, with a rush seat and slightly crooked legs, standing on red floor tiles against a blue-green wall. On the seat sit Van Gogh’s pipe and a twist of tobacco. Behind it, a low box of sprouting onions carries his signature, “Vincent”.

He painted it in late 1888, in the weeks he was sharing the Yellow House with Gauguin, and it was one of a pair. Alongside his own humble chair he painted Gauguin’s: a grander, curved armchair, set not in daylight but at night, lit by candle and gaslight, with two novels on the seat. The two were meant to hang together as stand-ins for the two men, the simple beside the ornate, the plain-living northerner beside the worldly Parisian. Van Gogh even painted his chair on a length of the coarse canvas Gauguin had brought south with him.

The empty seat was an image he came back to; the same rush-seated chair turns up in his famous paintings of his bedroom in Arles. The pair did not stay together, though. Gauguin’s chair passed down through the family and eventually reached the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, while Van Gogh’s chair found its way to London. So two chairs, painted side by side in one small house, now sit in different countries.

Farms near Auvers

The last of the five is also the last chapter of his life. By the summer of 1890 Van Gogh had left the south altogether and settled at Auvers-sur-Oise, a village just north of Paris, lodging in a small room above the local inn. He had two months left. Farms near Auvers is a view of the village edge: a huddle of old cottages with steep thatched and tiled roofs, backed by rising green fields, everything built up in short, hurried, olive-and-blue strokes.

At the top of the canvas there are bare, unpainted patches of sky. The picture was very likely never finished, and that, with the speed of the brushwork, places it right at the end. It is often listed among the very last things Van Gogh painted before his death in July 1890. After the crowds and the heat of the Sunflowers, it is a subdued and rather moving note to close on.

Bubbly Tips

• Check what is actually on show before a special trip. Three of the five Van Goghs here are private loans, and the Sunflowers itself travels. At the time of writing it is away in Philadelphia, so look at the National Gallery website before you build your day around one painting.
• Entry is free. The National Gallery does not charge admission. You can walk straight in, though a free timed ticket booked online can save queueing at the busiest times.
• Go early or late for the Sunflowers. The Van Gogh room is one of the busiest in the building. First thing in the morning, or the last hour before closing, gives you the best shot at the front of the crowd.
• Give the quieter four their due. Everyone stops at the Sunflowers, but Two Crabs, Landscape with Ploughman, Van Gogh’s Chair and Farms near Auvers sit in the same part of the Gallery and often have breathing room. They are worth as much time.
• Look for the signatures. Van Gogh signed the Sunflowers vase and the onion box in Van Gogh’s Chair, both just “Vincent”. Spotting them is half the fun.
• Pair it with Amsterdam if you can. Several of the “other halves” live in the Van Gogh Museum: Gauguin’s chair, a single crab on its back, and a repetition of the Sunflowers. Seeing London first makes Amsterdam richer.
• Photography is allowed, but mind the glare. Non-flash photos are fine in the permanent collection. The paintings catch the light, so shoot at a slight angle to cut the reflections.
• Christmas is pretty but packed. In December the domed halls with their trees are lovely, but the crowds are heavier. Weekday mornings are the calmer window.

Final Thoughts

Five paintings is not many, and yet they hold a whole life: the hopeful Sunflowers painted for a friend’s arrival, the crabs made to coax himself back to work after a breakdown, the ploughman he read as a portrait of himself, the empty chair standing in for the man, and the unfinished cottages of his final weeks. I came for one painting and left having met the artist across two of his hardest years, which is a rare thing to get from a single room.

And I am not done with him. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is next, where several of these paintings have their other halves waiting: Gauguin’s chair, a second crab, a twin set of sunflowers. Seeing the London pictures first has only made me more impatient for it. Until then, I have my own small version leaning against the wall at home, sunflowers in brick, signed Vincent.

Until next time!

The post Van Gogh at the National Gallery, London appeared first on Bubbly Living.

Even so, it earned the effort. This is Air France’s Schengen lounge in Terminal 2F, and it is one of the loveliest airport spaces I have spent a morning in.

The Air France 2F Lounge at a Glance
🏛️ The space · Opened 2021 in the Schengen hall, designed by Jouin Manku: 3,000 square metres, two floors, around 570 seats.
🪟 The view · A giant curved window Air France itself calls “runway view” vaults over both levels, facing the apron and a main runway.
💆 The spa · A free Clarins facial for lounge guests, first-come, first-served — put your name down the moment you arrive.
📺 The cameo · This is the lounge (and staircase) from the Emily in Paris season-four Christmas episode.
🥐 The food · 100% French sourcing, from the morning viennoiserie to seasonal hot dishes by Bocuse d’Or winner François Adamski.
🎫 The entry · Business class or SkyTeam Elite Plus gets you in free; economy can buy a pass, subject to space — but clear the border queues early.

The space

The lounge sits in the Schengen departures hall and was designed by the Jouin Manku agency. It spreads over two floors joined by a single sweeping staircase. The showpiece is the glass: a giant curved window, which Air France calls “runway view”, that vaults over both levels and runs the length of the space. Sit near it and the aircraft stands are right there, with a main runway beyond. Glass balustrades keep the line clear, so nothing breaks the view between the seats and the apron.

The layout is open, with seating that ranges from armchairs and low sofas near the glass to café tables further back. Both floors have food and seating, with a quieter mezzanine running around the upper level. There are showers and a relaxation area for anyone off a red-eye, and a Clarins spa I will come to.

The Emily in Paris moment

The staircase looked familiar the moment I reached it, and it took me a second to place why. It is the one Emily climbs in Emily in Paris. In the Christmas episode of season four, her boss Sylvie upgrades her to business class, she sweeps up into this lounge, and the Clarins spa gets its own small cameo, right before Emily learns her flight home to Chicago has been cancelled. I did not have Emily’s wardrobe or her luck, but I did have the same stairs

Food and drink

Food is set out as a self-service spread, with buffet stations on both floors. In the mornings it leans continental: baskets of breads and pastries, jams, a bistro counter, and hot and cold options to build a plate. Later in the day an award-winning French chef sends out hot dishes that change with the seasons. There is a fridge of soft drinks, and, this being Air France, wines and champagnes on hand.

Service is light, as it is in most big lounges. Guests collect their own food and drinks, though the staff keep the tables clear.

The Clarins spa

Near the relaxation area is a Clarins Traveller Spa, and this is the part worth planning around. Air France and Clarins offer a free facial treatment to lounge guests, given by Clarins therapists using the brand’s plant-based products. It runs daily except Sundays, from about 7:40am to 6:40pm, on a first-come, first-served basis. The slots go fast, so the spa is the first stop worth making on arrival, not the last.

Getting in

Access is by cabin or status, not by nationality. A business-class ticket qualifies, as does Flying Blue Elite Plus or SkyTeam Elite Plus status on any SkyTeam flight. Economy and premium travellers can buy a paid entry pass, subject to availability and usually from about three hours before departure. The price moves around, with recent reports near ninety euros, so it is worth confirming before relying on it. Whatever the route in, the border queues are the real gatekeeper, and the sooner they are cleared, the more of the lounge there is left to enjoy.

Bubbly Tips

• Clear the airport early. The lounge is lovely, but immigration and passport queues at CDG can be long, especially on a non-EU passport. Build in a buffer so the queue does not swallow your whole visit.
• Go to the Clarins spa first. The free facial is first-come, first-served and books out fast. Put your name down the moment you arrive, then go find food. Daily except Sundays, roughly 7:40am to 6:40pm.
• Sit by the curved window. The best seats face the glass, where you get the full two-storey “runway view” and the planes. The glass balustrades mean nothing blocks the view.
• Mornings are continental, so come later for the hot food. Early on it is breads, pastries and a cold spread. The award-winning chef’s hot dishes come out for lunch and dinner, so time your visit to what you want to eat.
• Ask about the champagne. Wines and champagnes are part of the offer and staff will pour, so you do not have to hunt for it at a counter.
• Use the upstairs for quiet. The ground floor by the food gets busy. Head up the staircase to the mezzanine for calmer seating and the same view.
• Paid entry if you are in economy. No status and flying economy? Air France sells a lounge pass subject to space, recently around ninety euros. Buy it at the kiosk outside or through your booking, and check the current price first.
• Spot the Emily in Paris staircase. This is the lounge and the staircase from the season four Christmas episode. It makes a fun photo, just mind the people actually using the stairs.
• Showers and a nap area. Off a long flight, there are showers and a relaxation area with nap loungers, both handy on a long layover.

Final Thoughts

Airport lounges are usually a means to an end, somewhere to sit until a screen says to move. The Air France lounge in Terminal 2F is one of the few I would build a layover around. The curved glass, the staircase, a free Clarins facial if the timing works, and a plate of good French food with a runway in front of it: it is a genuinely nice way to spend an hour or two in transit.

The only shame is how much of that hour the queues to reach it can swallow. Cleared early, though, they leave time for what is one of the best rooms at Charles de Gaulle to be stuck in. Emily thought so too, at least until they cancelled her flight.

Until next time!

The post The Air France Lounge at Paris-CDG, Terminal 2F appeared first on Bubbly Living.