I had the pleasure of accompanying Sharon to a meeting of the International Advisory Board of Bocconi University in Milan this weekend. It was good to catch up with regular participants from Bocconi, Columbia, Princeton, Duke and the Harvard Business School, but there was also opportunity to take in some music, art and scenery.

The music was an entertaining Così fan tutte at La Scala, Mozart’s couple-swapping tale of two young men who accept a bet from a philosopher that their fiancées will be unfaithful when wooed by each other’s partners in disguise. The director Robert Carsen transported the action to a Temptation Island style reality TV show, which worked well as framing and made for a buzzy, colourful, high-tech production.

An American TV critic once described Temptation Island as “creepy-cheesy” and the same could be said of the opera, with its cynical assertions that women are inherently unfaithful and men prone to shallow pride and insecurity. But the final sentiment is that love can still proceed if we are realistic and accept that human emotions are flawed.

The art was an intriguing exhibition of work by the Lancashire-born and ultimately Mexican-based author and painter Leonora Carrington at the Palazzo Reale. This wasn’t on my list to visit, but catching up with the preparations for next year’s Surrealist-themed Commemoration Ball earlier in the week had put me in the mood.

Born in 1917, Carrington led a life rich in incident and her paintings abound in strange figures, fantastic beasts and mysterious rituals. According to the curators: “Often finding herself on the margins – as a woman, an immigrant, an exile, a mother, a survivor of violence – Carrington developed the idea of the journey as central to her vision of life: an odyssey in which travel is not only geographical but also metaphorical, through arcane knowledge, forgotten beliefs and heterodox forms of wisdom that sought to reposition women within history”.

The scenery was a brisk trip up to and across Lake Como – train to Varenna, ferry to Bellagio (and a good lunch), fast boat to Como (and its fine duomo) and another train back to Milan. Low cloud and mist obscured the surrounding peaks, making it a less spectacular – but more atmospheric – visit than the last I made 30+ years ago.

As the ferry pulls into Bellagio, you pass the Grand Hotel and gardens of the Villa Serbelloni – both inaccessible and slightly threatening at this time of year. They are the setting for the first of our Honorary Fellow Ted Meron’s recently published Poems on being, on love and on grief. He will be reading and talking about them with Senior Tutor Rebecca Bullard in the Auditorium at 5.00 pm on Wednesday. Do go if you can.