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Always great service.
Not your fault, but I find car rental an extremely stressful process these days.
After a scare on baggage was fixed by the team everything was very smooth!
It is so nice to speak to a real person promptly, without holding and selecting multiple options, particularly when the service is also excellent. Many thanks to Abbie Magbagbeola who booked our accommodation and flights. I have recommended her at every opportunity.
Billy sorted out our flights when there was a slight mix up up on our arrangements.
Friendly, knowledgeable service and the best price. Thank you
Jed was very professional and helpful
I can thoroughly recommend DialAFlight for their advice and attention to detail in arranging and booking a holiday. Libby McGarry and her colleagues are first class and always available to help and support you when needed.
Perfect from start to finish
Outstanding service throughout as expected from previous experience. I would recommend DialAFlight to anybody looking for timely professional and friendly help with travelling
Some of the hotels were not great. The best was Pyroscafold in Desenzano. Hertz let the side down, not you.
Everything was well organised, hotel was wonderful and transfers were punctual
All good and arrangements went exactly as advised - this is about the 10th time we've used DialAFlight and every trip has been faultless.
DialAFlight performance is excellent - just a shame the car company that was booked wasn’t good.
I find Marshall, excellent - always helpful and on the case, been doing my holidays and flights for a very long time
Joe Orton is always efficient and on hand if help is needed.
Unfortunately there was a building site at the back of our hotel, the noise started at 8am and finished at 6pm. It didn't interfere with our holiday as such, just had to keep your patio doors closed when you were in the room.
Best service and prices. Our go-to guys.
Excellent service and very friendly and professional team making sure customers get a well deserved service
Dave Probert always organises so well
The whole trip went well - very happy with your work and organising
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Orlando is a star.
You delivered again which is good to see.
As always, great, friendly service. I always recommend you to friends.
Thank you Sadie for another lovely trip. Hopper transfer did arrive late but worked out OK with the flight delay due to French air traffic controllers strike.
Another brilliant holiday from start to finish. Always so helpful with the itinerary and when I ask for changes to plans.
You did an excellent job as always. It may be worth warning clients that Schipol airport is currently chaotic, everything in Milan was running late and we almost missed the second flight. Several people did miss the flight and several of us arrived at Cardiff with no luggage!
I was concerned that I would have to cancel my trip following my flight being cancelled, but DialAFlight quickly found replacement flights for the same dates saving me the stress and hassle of dealing with the airline. Very happy I booked with DialAFlight.
Italy's second city is not best known for understatement. As the country's economic hub and the world's fashion capital, it has much to brag about, and isn't shy about doing so. On one subject, however, it's strangely reticent. The city possesses art treasures as magnificent as any in Rome or Florence, many unsurpassed in their power to take the breath away.
It's also the place where one comes closest to the greatest genius of the Renaissance or any other age - Leonardo da Vinci. Milan is where you crack the real da Vinci code. Yet tourism plays only a minor role in Milan's economy, which is what makes it so very relaxing to visit as a tourist.
After queueing at the Vatican or the Uffizi in Florence, Milan's underused galleries and museums feel like a rest cure. It's not unusual to be alone in a roomful of stunning paintings and feel Raphael, Bellini and Caravaggio all competing for your attention.
Originally the Roman Empire's western capital, Milan was subsumed into the Holy Roman Empire, then invaded and occupied in turn by Spain, Austria and France. Napoleon crowned himself king of Italy here in 1805.
For centuries, Milan was a hugely prosperous inland port, standing on a network of canals that linked it with the Adriatic and Lake Maggiore. They were only filled in when the populace decided they'd prefer an urban tram system.
It is a city of palaces, like Venice, and colonnades, like Bologna. However, these days the ground floors of these palaces are often designer boutiques. And the colonnades exemplify the general plainness of Milanese architecture with their undecorated ceilings and pillars.
The one exception is the city's cathedral, the Duomo, a Gothic-baroque fantasy of Candoglia marble. It took over 500 years to build and is adorned by 135 spires and more than 2,000 statues.
I'm here in the care of Art Tours, founded by former guide James McDonaugh, which specialises in private, out-of-hours visits to galleries. James, 34, is leading our group personally and gets us access to Castello Sforzesco, a former stronghold of Francesco Sforza, the 15th Century Duke of Milan who was da Vinci's employer years before he painted the Mona Lisa.
On the way, Anthony tells us about the CV which that ultimate Renaissance Man sent to the Duke in hopes of getting the gig; da Vinci doesn't even mention he's a painter, focusing instead on his engineering skills.
Thanks to our pass, we're allowed to roam the Castello after closing time, peering at the Rondanini Pieta, Michelangelo's final sculpture. We're then taken to the Sala delle Asse, a room painted by Leonardo in 1498. His unfinished design of trompe l'oeil mulberry trees, later covered by 13 layers of ordinary household paint, has been under restoration for many years and will be for many more to come.
I later head out on my own to the nearby fashion district, the Quadrilatero d'Oro or Golden Quadrilateral around Via della Spiga and Via Monte Napoleon. The menswear stores leave me utterly confused as to what constitutes cutting-edge fashion. In one window, there's a jewelled leather codpiece. In the next, a grey woollen jumper identical to those I used to wear to school in the 1950s.
Between the opera house La Scala and the Duomo stretches the vast Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II shopping mall, known locally as Il Salotto di Milano, or Milan's drawing room.
It's a magnet for the city's beautiful people and in its central rotunda is the modest facade of the first-ever Prada store, established in 1913. Back then, the ultimate celebrity label was more mundanely called Fratellli Prada (Prada Brothers) and dealt only in 'valigeria' - luggage.
Our final evening is devoted to perhaps the greatest, certainly the most troubled, of all Leonardo's masterpieces. At the former convent of Santa Maria Delle Grazie, we're given a private viewing of The Last Supper.
From the moment it was completed in 1498, the paint Leonardo had used began to lose its colour.The room served as a refectory for the convent's Dominican nuns and in the 17th Century, a rectangle was cut in the bottom of the painting to make a door through to the kitchen.
Two hundred years later, Napoleon's men amused themselves by throwing stones at the painting or else gouging out the eyes of the apostles with their sabres.
Dan Brown's novel the Da Vinci Code starts from the premise that Jesus secretly fathered a child with Mary Magdalene. Brown's readers are always asking my guide whether Mary is 'the blonde' in The Last Supper.
After the five centuries of vandalism and neglect Leonardo's sublime vision has suffered, that somehow seems the worst insult of all.
First published in the Mail on Sunday - May 2016
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