Discover Milan

A taste of Milan

Milan is Italy's modern engine — its fashion capital, financial capital, design capital, and the country's most consciously cosmopolitan city, a confident counterweight to Rome's monumentality and Florence's Renaissance reverence. The Duomo, Italy's largest cathedral, took 600 years to build (1386–1965) and bristles with 3,400 statues, 135 spires, and the gold-topped Madonnina figure overlooking the city; climb to the rooftop terrace (lift or stairs) for an extraordinary panoramic walk between the buttresses. Adjacent, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II — the world's oldest active shopping arcade (1877) under a glass-and-iron dome — leads to La Scala, the most important opera house in the world (catch a rehearsal if you can't get a seat). A short walk west, the brilliant Pinacoteca di Brera (Mantegna, Raphael, Caravaggio) and Sforza Castle (with Michelangelo's last unfinished Pietà Rondanini), and across town, the 15th-century Santa Maria delle Grazie convent where Leonardo's 'Last Supper' fresco is preserved (book months in advance, only 35 visitors at a time). Beyond the historic centre, Milan's design pull is unmissable: the Brera and Tortona quarters for design week in April; the Fondazione Prada by OMA; the Bosco Verticale residential towers; and the high-fashion 'quadrilatero' between Via Montenapoleone and Via della Spiga.