The Duomo di Milano is the city's great Gothic cathedral: a mountain of pinkish-white marble bristling with spires and statues, with the golden Madonnina on top. It is the largest church on Italian soil, since St. Peter's stands in the Vatican,...
The Sforza Castle is the great red-brick fortress of the Dukes of Milan, at the edge of the center, between Corso Sempione and Via Dante. As much a symbol of the city as the Duomo, it is one of the largest castles in Europe and today houses the...
The Teatro alla Scala is Milan's great opera house, in Piazza della Scala, a few steps from the Duomo. Since 1778 it has hosted opera, ballet and concerts, and its name is synonymous with opera the world over.
From outside it looks almost...
The Pinacoteca di Brera is Milan's great art gallery, in the Palazzo di Brera, in the neighborhood of the same name. It collects mostly Venetian and Lombard painting, with masterpieces by Mantegna, Raphael, Piero della Francesca and...
The Pinacoteca Ambrosiana is the art museum of the Palazzo dell'Ambrosiana, in the center of Milan, a stone's throw from Piazza del Duomo. Born in the 17th century next to a famous library, it holds paintings by Leonardo, Botticelli, Raphael and...
The Cenacolo is Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, painted on the wall of the refectory of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, beside the church of the same name. It is the most famous depiction of the Last Supper: it measures about...
The Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio is one of the oldest churches in Milan, in Piazza Sant'Ambrogio, dedicated to the city's patron saint. Its present look is Romanesque, 11th century, but the plan is still the one the saint wanted: three aisles, a...
The Museo Poldi Pezzoli is a house museum on Via Manzoni, a few steps from La Scala: the apartment of a 19th-century collector count, left as an art gallery. It is part of the "Case Museo di Milano" and brings together paintings, weapons,...
Parco Sempione is Milan's great public park behind the Sforza Castle: about 386,000 square meters of lawns, paths and trees, between the castle and the Arco della Pace. It has fitness trails for running, a playground and sculptures scattered here...
The Museo Teatrale alla Scala is Milan's opera museum, in the Casino Ricordi, the building next to the Teatro alla Scala. Fourteen rooms of portraits, antique instruments, set sketches and paintings tell two centuries of opera and...
The Navigli are Milan's canals, the water district around the Darsena, in the Porta Ticinese area. They once formed a system linking the city to Lake Maggiore and Lake Como, the Ticino and the Po; today what remains are the stretches around the...
The Museums of the Sforza Castle are Milan's civic collections, housed in the rooms of the Castello Sforzesco: paintings, sculptures, furniture, ceramics, musical instruments, archaeological finds. The most famous piece is Michelangelo's last...
Brera is Milan's artists' quarter, a short walk from the Duomo and La Scala: narrow lanes, antique dealers, galleries, historic cafés and workshops, around the Pinacoteca and the Academy of Fine Arts. It is one of the most characteristic areas of...
The Basilica of San Lorenzo Maggiore is one of the oldest churches in Milan, on Corso di Porta Ticinese, facing the sixteen Roman columns that stand before it: the building was rebuilt several times, but the plan is still that of the late 4th...
The Church of Santa Maria presso San Satiro is a small Renaissance church in the center of Milan, famous for a master's trick: Donato Bramante's false choir, a perspective painted and modeled in terracotta that looks almost ten meters deep and is...
The Museo del Duomo of Milan, today the Grande Museo del Duomo, collects statues, stained glass, tapestries, models and the cathedral's treasury. It is housed in Palazzo Reale, in Piazza del Duomo, next to the cathedral: 26 rooms covering about...
The Villa Reale in Milan is a grand neoclassical villa from the late 1700s on Via Palestro, across from the Giardini Indro Montanelli, near Porta Venezia. It houses the Galleria d'Arte Moderna, with nineteenth-century painting and a fine...
The Archaeological Museum of Milan tells the story of Mediolanum, the Roman city that stood where Corso Magenta runs today. It is housed in the former Monastero Maggiore of San Maurizio, and the building is already an exhibit: walls, towers and...
The Palazzo Reale is the large building to the right of the Duomo's facade, where Milan was governed for centuries. Today it is one of the city's most important exhibition venues: neoclassical rooms that host art, design and fashion, from Monet...
The Giuseppe Meazza stadium, known to everyone as San Siro, is home to AC Milan and Inter, in the district of the same name west of central Milan. They call it "the La Scala of football," and it is the largest stadium in Italy.
It opened...
The Colonne di San Lorenzo (Columns of San Lorenzo) are sixteen Roman columns in a row in front of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, just past Porta Ticinese: one of the rare remains of imperial Milan still in place, and one of the Milanese's most...
Porta Ticinese is one of Milan's six great gates, opened in the Spanish bastions that no longer exist. It stands in the middle of Piazza XXIV Maggio, where Corso di Porta Ticinese meets the Darsena and the Navigli, with Luigi Cagnola's...
The Basilica of Sant'Eustorgio is one of the oldest churches in Milan, near Porta Ticinese. It is the church of the Three Kings: here, according to tradition, their relics arrived, and inside are two masterpieces that alone are worth the...
The Arco della Pace (Arch of Peace) is Milan's neoclassical triumphal arch, at the start of Corso Sempione, at the end of Parco Sempione, behind the Castello Sforzesco. Three archways, fluted columns and a large bronze sculpture on top: it is the...
The Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci is the largest science and technology museum in Italy, in a sixteenth-century monastery on Via San Vittore. You come to see Leonardo, but also a submarine, trains, planes and a...
The Pirelli skyscraper, the "Pirellone," is Gio Ponti's skyscraper next to Stazione Centrale: 127 meters, 31 floors, a slender, beveled silhouette that has become a symbol of Milan. It houses the Regional Council of Lombardy.
Milan had an...
The Triennale di Milano is a cultural center for design, architecture, art, photography and fashion, in the Palazzo dell'Arte, at the edge of Parco Sempione. Inside are exhibitions, a design museum, a theater and a library.
At first it was...
Piazza Mercanti is Milan's medieval square, a short walk from the Duomo: a cozy corner of brick and arches, born in the thirteenth century as the political and commercial heart of the city.
Whoever went bankrupt in medieval Milan ended up...
Porta Venezia is the northeastern entrance to Milan, where Corso Venezia opens into Piazza Oberdan. It consists of two neoclassical toll houses decorated with statues, one of the gates opened in the Spanish bastions that no longer...
The Museo di Storia Naturale of Milan is the museum of dinosaurs, dioramas and almost three million specimens, in a neo-Gothic building in the Giardini Pubblici of Porta Venezia.
Among its treasures is a famous fossil, a baby dinosaur...
The Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano is an apartment in Milan, on Via Jan, where a couple of collectors lived all their lives among the masterpieces of 20th-century Italian art. Boccioni, de Chirico, Carrà, Sironi, De Pisis and Fontana are all here,...
The Torre Velasca is the "mushroom" skyscraper near Piazza Missori, in the center of Milan: a concrete tower whose upper part is wider than the rest, with oblique beams in view. The Milanese call it the "skyscraper with suspenders."
"An...
The Torre Branca is the steel lookout tower of Parco Sempione in Milan, next to the Triennale's Palazzo dell'Arte: 108.6 meters of bolted tubes designed by Gio Ponti in 1933. An elevator takes you to the top in under a minute, to see the whole...
Milan's Civic Aquarium is a small Art Nouveau building in the Sempione Park area, the only one left from the 1906 International Exposition: the third-oldest aquarium in Europe, with fish and habitats from both fresh water and the sea.
The...
The Rotonda della Besana is a large Baroque complex on Via Besana in Milan, right by the old Bastions: a brick portico with undulating lines that encloses a garden and a church. Today it is a public park and a venue for exhibitions and events,...
The Cimitero Monumentale of Milan is an open-air museum: a large nineteenth-century cemetery, a short walk from the center, full of sculptural tombs of Milanese families, to be seen the way you visit a gallery.
A life-size Last Supper in...
The Certosa di Garegnano is a monastery founded in 1349 by Giovanni Visconti, archbishop and lord of Milan, once out in open country and today in the Garegnano neighborhood, northwest of the city. Off the usual routes, it hides a church with...
The Bagatti Valsecchi Museum is a gentleman's house in the center of Milan, furnished in the late 1800s like a Lombard Renaissance palace and left just as it was. It is among the best-preserved house museums in Europe: a journey into the 1400s,...
Palazzo Litta is one of Milan's great Baroque palaces, on Corso Magenta: a Rococo facade in a pale carmine, unusual for Milan, two stone giants at the entrance and, behind it, courtyards and halls where the Milanese nobility held their...
Milan's Stazione Centrale is not just the city's main railway station: it is a monument you enter to catch a train and end up staring at the ceiling. Opened in 1931, it blends Liberty, Art Deco and the monumentality of the Fascist...