🇮🇹 Italy · Northern Italy (Veneto, Lombardy and Liguria)
Milan is the Italy you do not expect: not the one of ruins and temples but the one of design, fashion, finance and the aperitivo at dusk. It is an elegant, fast-paced city, a world fashion capital alongside Paris, New York and London, home to the great couture houses and to the Salone del Mobile, the most important design fair on the planet. But behind that modern façade it keeps treasures of the very first rank: one of the largest Gothic cathedrals in the world, Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper and centuries of history running from imperial Rome to the Renaissance Sforza.
The heart of the city is the Duomo, that mountain of white marble bristling with spires and statues whose terraces you can walk, wandering among the pinnacles with the Alps in the background. Beside it, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II — Milan's 'drawing room', with its mosaics and its iron and glass dome — connects with Piazza della Scala and the most famous opera house in the world. Nearby are the imposing Castello Sforzesco, the exquisite Pinacoteca di Brera and the Quadrilatero della Moda, where the windows of Prada, Armani, Versace and Dolce & Gabbana parade past.
This guide covers Milan with a practical, realistic eye: how to book the Last Supper months in advance (the single most important piece of information), how to go up the Duomo, how to get around with contactless transport, where to have the classic Milanese aperitivo in the Navigli and how to use the city as a springboard for Lake Como. Milan is enjoyed differently from other Italian cities: less postcard and more real life, with class and with style.
Milan was born as Mediolanum, a Celtic town conquered by Rome in 222 BC that went on to be capital of the Western Roman Empire: here, in the year 313, the emperor Constantine agreed the famous Edict of Milan, which granted freedom of worship to Christians. After turbulent centuries, in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance the city shone under two dynasties, the Visconti and the Sforza, who raised the Duomo and the castle and invited Leonardo da Vinci, who painted the Last Supper here. Then came Spanish and Austrian rule, the Risorgimento with the heroic Five Days of 1848 against the Austrians, the bombing of 1943 and, after the war, the 'economic miracle' that made it Italy's industrial and financial capital. All that history, with its names and dates, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Italy of trade and industry: Venice and its thousand-year maritime republic, the Milan of the Visconti and the Sforza, the Genoa of the navigators, learned Bologna and the economic engine that turned Italy into an industrial power.
Read the history of Northern Italy (Veneto, Lombardy and Liguria) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before it was Italy's capital of fashion and finance, Milan was Mediolanum, and before that a settlement of the Celtic Insubres tribe, founded around the 6th or 5th century BC in the middle of the Po plain. The Latin name, Mediolanum, is usually read as 'the land in the middle' or 'what lies in the middle of the plain', a reference to its strategic position at the crossroads of northern Italy. That geographical centrality would shape its whole destiny: Milan was never a city of the sea or of a great navigable river, but it was a hub of routes through which everything passed.
In 222 BC, the Roman legions conquered the city and absorbed it into the Republic. In time, Mediolanum grew into one of the most important cities of the Empire, and in AD 286 the emperor Diocletian chose it as capital of the Western Roman Empire, a rank it held for more than a century. It was in that period, in the year 313, that one of the events that changed the history of the West happened here: the emperor Constantine and his co-emperor Licinius agreed the so-called Edict of Milan, which granted freedom of worship throughout the Empire and ended the persecution of Christians. Although the text was formally issued in another city, the agreement was sealed in Milan, and that is why it bears its name.
Milan was also the city of St Ambrose (Ambrogio), bishop between 374 and 397, one of the great figures of the early Church, who baptised St Augustine here and who is still the city's patron saint: his feast day, 7 December, marks the opening of the La Scala season. With the Germanic invasions and the fall of the Western Empire in 476, Mediolanum suffered sackings and destruction, but its central position allowed it to rise again and again.
Through the Middle Ages, Milan re-emerged as a powerful free commune, a city-state with its own government. In the 12th century it faced the German emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, who besieged and razed it in 1162; but Milan led the Lombard League, an alliance of northern cities that defeated the emperor at the battle of Legnano (1176), an episode that centuries later would become a symbol of Lombard and Italian pride.
From the 13th century, power was concentrated in the hands of one family: the Visconti, who governed Milan first as lords and then, from 1395, as dukes, when Gian Galeazzo Visconti bought the ducal title from the emperor. Under the Visconti, the duchy of Milan became one of the most powerful states in Italy, and it was Gian Galeazzo who, in 1386, laid the first stone of the work that would define the city's skyline for ever: the Duomo, the Gothic marble cathedral that would take almost six centuries to complete.
In 1450, after a brief republican interlude, power passed to the Sforza, a dynasty of condottieri (mercenary military leaders) who reached the ducal throne through a mix of military force and political skill: Francesco Sforza, married to the Visconti heiress, proclaimed himself duke and had the imposing Castello Sforzesco built. Under his son and successors, and above all under Ludovico Sforza, nicknamed 'il Moro', Milan lived its greatest Renaissance splendour and its court became one of the most brilliant in Europe. It was Ludovico who called to Milan a Florentine artist and engineer who would work here for almost twenty years: Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo da Vinci arrived in Milan around 1482, in his early thirties, and found in the court of Ludovico il Moro the patron he was looking for. For almost two decades he worked for the Sforza in the most varied roles: painter, sculptor, military engineer, organiser of court festivities, town planner and inventor. He studied the city's canal system — the Navigli — improved their locks to make them navigable, designed war machines and planned a colossal bronze equestrian statue in honour of Francesco Sforza that was never cast (the bronze ended up being used for cannon when the French threatened the duchy).
But the work that made him immortal in Milan was a religious commission: between 1495 and 1498, Leonardo painted The Last Supper (Il Cenacolo) on the refectory wall of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Instead of the traditional fresco technique, which forced the painter to work fast on wet plaster, Leonardo experimented with a mix of tempera and oil on a dry wall, which let him work slowly and in full detail but proved disastrous for conservation: the painting began to deteriorate in the artist's own lifetime. Even so, the work revolutionised painting through its composition and its masterly way of capturing the psychological instant in which Jesus announces the betrayal and each apostle reacts.
The fall of Ludovico il Moro to the French in 1499-1500 marked the end of the great Sforza period and also Leonardo's departure from Milan. From then on the city was fought over by the great powers of the day, and its fate would depend more and more on foreign kings and emperors.
During the Italian Wars of the 16th century, the duchy of Milan was one of the great prizes fought over by France and Spain. In 1535, after the last Sforza duke died without heirs, Milan passed to the Spanish Habsburg Crown, and for almost two centuries (until 1706) it was governed as a Spanish possession. It was a period of economic weight and also of tragedy: the city suffered the terrible plague of 1630, the same one that Alessandro Manzoni would portray two centuries later in his great novel The Betrothed (I promessi sposi), with its scenes of the untori accused of spreading the contagion and of Cardinal Federico Borromeo.
In 1706, during the War of the Spanish Succession, Milan passed to the Austrian Habsburgs, and Austrian rule (with a brief interruption) would last until the mid-19th century. Austrian Milan in the 18th century went through a period of enlightened reform under the empress Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II: the administration was modernised, cultural institutions were founded and, in 1778, the Teatro alla Scala opened on the site of a demolished church. It was also the age of the Lombard Enlightenment, with figures such as the jurist Cesare Beccaria, author of On Crimes and Punishments, a pioneering work against torture and the death penalty.
Between 1796 and 1814, Napoleon's arrival redrew the map: Milan became capital of the Cisalpine Republic and then of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, and it was in those years that the façade of the Duomo was finally completed, on Napoleon's orders. After the emperor's fall, the Congress of Vienna (1815) returned Milan to Austria, now as capital of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia. But the spirit of liberty had already caught.
In the 19th century, Milan became one of the hearts of the Risorgimento, the movement for the unification and independence of Italy against foreign rule, above all Austrian. Discontent with Austria grew among the Milanese middle class and ordinary people, and it burst out in March 1848, as part of the revolutionary wave that shook all of Europe that year.
Between 18 and 22 March 1848, the city staged a heroic uprising that went down in history as the Five Days of Milan (le Cinque Giornate). For five days, Milanese of every kind — artisans, students, shopkeepers, women, priests — threw up barricades in the streets and, armed with whatever they had, took on Marshal Radetzky's powerful Austrian garrison. Against all odds, the uprising succeeded: the Austrian army had to withdraw from the city. It was one of the most glorious and celebrated episodes of the entire Risorgimento.
The victory, however, was short-lived: a few months later, after the defeat of the Piedmontese army, the Austrians retook Milan and the repression was harsh. It would take the Second War of Italian Independence: in 1859, Franco-Piedmontese troops defeated Austria at the battles of Magenta and Solferino, and Milan and all of Lombardy joined the kingdom that in 1861 would be proclaimed the Kingdom of Italy. The memory of the Five Days is preserved in the name of one of the city's great squares and in the monument that commemorates it.
As the industrial and financial capital of a united Italy, Milan grew at dizzying speed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with factories, railways, publishing houses and banks. It was also a political breeding ground: workers' and socialist movements were born here, and here, in 1919, in Piazza San Sepolcro, Benito Mussolini founded the first Fasci di Combattimento, the seed of the fascism that would govern Italy for two decades.
The Second World War hit Milan hard. In August 1943, Allied bombing devastated much of the historic centre: bombs fell on the Teatro alla Scala, which was left half destroyed, and on the Santa Maria delle Grazie complex, where the refectory holding Leonardo's Last Supper took a hit and lost an entire wall; the painting survived by a miracle because it had been protected with sandbags and scaffolding. After the regime fell and the Germans occupied the city, Milan was a key centre of the partisan Resistance. The city was liberated on 25 April 1945, a date Italy marks as its Liberation Day; a few days later, Mussolini's body, after his capture and execution beside Lake Como, was displayed in Milan's Piazzale Loreto, in the very place where months earlier the occupiers had shot fifteen partisans.
Out of the postwar years, Milan came back with extraordinary energy. It was the engine of Italy's so-called 'economic miracle' of the 1950s and 1960s, with its industry, its design, its advertising and its publishing. In 1946, the rebuilt Scala reopened with a memorable concert conducted by Arturo Toscanini. In the following decades, the city established itself as a world capital of fashion and design, home to Fashion Week and the Salone del Mobile, and as Italy's financial heart, with the stock exchange and the big banks. Today, with its renewed skyline of towers at Porta Nuova and CityLife, Milan is the most European and modern of the big Italian cities, while still guarding the eternal smile of The Last Supper and the white silhouette of its Duomo.