LOOKING FOR ADVENTURE - AND CLEAN SOCKS - IN MILAN.

Byline: Thomas Swick Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

So much of travel is looking for things.

You begin by looking for a place to go and then you look for a place to stay. Once there, you look for places to eat. You hunt for postcards and then - with less success - post offices. Before you leave, of course, you look for presents to bring home to loved ones.

The mistake is to think that all this time spent looking is wasted.

In Milan not too long ago, I passed my first few hours in an instructive hunt for a hotel - getting a feel for the city on a Sunday afternoon - and first thing the next morning, I set out in search of a laundry.

It took all morning, but I finally found a we-do-it-for-you coin-operated laundry. While waiting for socks and underwear, promised at 2 p.m., I decided to explore.

A block away, a canal stretched. I walked past the exhausted columns of the Piazza XXIV Maggio and down quiet, treeless, working-class streets. On the other side of the canal, I had a pizza and a glass of red wine. Then I bought a ``Corriere della Sera'' and tried to decipher the headlines while sitting on a bench in a triangular park where lyceum students, freed from behind the high walls opposite, flirted and smoked. I was in Italy, waiting to pick up my laundry.

Milan is not the Italian city most tourists visit. It is in the north, for one thing, and is heavy and severe, the center of fashion and banking: a businesslike place in a wine-loving land.

On Via Dante, scooters swerve around BMWs, just missing the trams. At Dante's mouth, Piazza Cordusio brims with urbanness, as half a dozen streets converge and modern orange trams snake past soot-stained facades topped with turrets and domes. A few blocks away, on one of the side streets, a plaque marks the old American Red Cross hospital where Hemingway recuperated and fell in love before writing about it all in ``A Farewell to Arms.''

People have a serious demeanor; the men look as if they'd be more at home in a library than on a runway.

But around 6, the city softens. Cafe waiters decorate their bars with silver chalices sprouting colorful paper napkins, oddly ornate receptacles for the spoils - potato chips, peanuts, cheese puffs - of office workers. Yet this Italian love of ornamentation gives even the humblest establishments a festive air.

Toward dusk a large number of people, many of them tourists, gather in the square in front of the cathedral, a Gothic mass of feathery marble pinnacles that from certain angles, seems to exist of nothing but vertical, incrementally diminishing spears. The westward-facing facade turns rose as the sun descends. And a few of the people in the animated crowd watch the coloring of stone with the same awe that tourists reserve for sunsets on the south rim of the Grand Canyon.

When the show is over, some head off to the opera at La Scala. Milan's two most famous buildings are connected by the magnificent Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. In a brief, solid row, monuments to religion, art and commerce.

The galleria is called the ``salon of Milan,'' but it is also the apotheosis of the shopping mall. The arched glass ceiling sits so high that you are left with an ambiguous feeling, caught somewhere in a shadowy land between outdoors and indoors. The elegant cafes with their outside tables suggest a street, while the dreamy frescoes speak of antique interiors.

One evening, I walked to the university and, in a graceful, interior courtyard, found two students leaned against columns with books on their laps. We chatted, and Federica, who was studying pedagogy, suggested places I should go: Via Montenapoleone, with its designer shops - ``You just have to look at the prices and laugh. You can't even think of buying anything'' - and the theater near my hotel: Piccolo Teatro di Milano, one of the best in Italy. I asked if they'd ever been to La Scala.

``Once,'' said Angelica, a student of Italian literature. ``I'd like to go now - `La Traviata' is playing - but the tickets are so expensive. You can get them for 10,000 lira (about $6.50), way up top, but you have to get up at 5 o'clock in the morning.''

My last evening in Milan I spent looking for a restaurant. I passed a few places, but they were either too empty or too expensive or didn't have risotto alla Milanese on the menu. I had ordered the dish my first evening in the city and had had one of those taste awakenings you sometimes get when traveling. An undistinguished glob of yellow rice became, in my mouth, a revelation. I needed more.

The restaurant I finally decided on, after about an hour's walk, sat across the street from my hotel. It was crowded and noisy. My waiter was middle-aged and absent-minded and wore that beleaguered look that in France would have been accompanied by a reproachful sneer but here was softened by a kind of fatalistic bemusement. ``Si, si, il risotto per signore.''

It was as good as the first night. When I had finished, I left several thousand lira on the table - I always feel like a big tipper in Italy - and walked across the street to my hotel. It was late and there was nothing else to look for.

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II is filled with cafes and book stores.

Thomas Swick/Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel