Best Things to Do in Milan

The Last Supper

Milan’s most popular mural,” Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last week, is hidden out on a wall of the refectory adjoining the Basilica di Santa Maria delle Grazie. Depicting Christ and his disciples at the moment when Christ shows he’s mindful of his betrayal, it’s one of the world’s most iconic pictures and a masterful study. You sign up for a guided city tour or might just kick yourself if you miss that.

A monk noted that he would get to the morning, stare at the day’s efforts, then finish for the afternoon, when Leonardo was on the job on the masterpiece. Your visit will soon be similarly brief (1-5 minutes to be accurate ), however, the bags of a thousand dodgy reproductions are fast drop after standing face to face with the luminous work .

Duomo

600 years in the making, A vision in pink Candoglia marble, the extravagant Gothic cathedral of Milan, efficiently reflects the creativity and ambition of the city. Its white facade, adorned with 135 spires and 3400 statues, rises like a tiara’s filigree, wowing the audiences with its detail. The inside is no less impressive, punctuated by three enormous apse windows, whereas into a casket that is rock-crystal saintly Carlo Borromeo is interred in the crypt.

Cimitero Monumentale

Behind striking walls, Milan’s wealthy have retained their dynastic ambitions living after death since 1866 with sculptural gestures. Nineteenth-century death-and-the-maiden eroticism gives way from masters. Studio BBPR’s geometric steel-and-marble memorial to the WWII concentration camp dead of Milan sits at the center, moving and crude. Even the tombs are separated into three zones: while people of Jewish descent remainder on the right and non-Catholics over the left platform lies side. Catch a map inside the forecourt.

Inside under the star-studded lapis dome, is the sarcophagus of all both Italian letters of novelist and father Alessandro Manzoni, while footballer, Giuseppe Meazza and Francesco Hayez and Milan’s most famous performer, both can be found from the crypt below.

Pinacoteca di Brera

Located upstairs from one of Italy’s most prestigious art schools, this gallery houses Milan’s number of Old Masters’raised’ out of Venice by Napoleon. Rubens, Goya, and Van Dyck have a place, however, you are here to the Italians: Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and the Bellini brothers. Much of the work has tremendous emotional clout, most notably Mantegna’s brutal Lamentation over the Dead Christ.

Quadrilatero d’Oro

A wander across the Quadrilatero d’Oro, the planet’s most famous shopping district, is essential for people not sartorially inclined. Even the quaintly cobbled quadrangle of roads — loosely bound by Via Monte Napoleone, Via Sant’Andrea, Via Senato and Via Manzoni — happen to be synonymous with elegance and money, and even in the event you don’t have the slightest urge to overthrow a swag of slick shopping bags, the window exhibits, and people-watching are priceless.

Castello Sforzesco

A Visconti fortress, this iconic castle was later home to the Sforza dynasty, who ruled Renaissance Milan. The DaVinci designed the defenses of the castle; the moat later drained and removed the draw bridges. Today, it houses seven specialized museums, which accumulate together intriguing fragments of Milan’s cultural and civic foundation, for example, Michelangelo’s final job, the Rondanini Pietà, now housed at the frescoed hallway of the castle’s most Ospedale Spagnolo (Spanish Hospital).

Of those museums, the most interesting is the Musei d’Arte Antica (Museum of Ancient Art), which is displayed in the ducal apartments, a few of which are frescoed from Leonardo DaVinci. A part of the collection is early Paleo Christian sculptures, the equestrian tomb of Bernarbò Visconti and reliefs constituting Milan’s victory over Barbarossa. The exhibition eloquently tells the story of the birth of Italy’s first city comune through murderous dynastic and regional ambitions, that left that one of the most powerful courts in Europe.

Museo del Novecento

Overlooking Piazza del Duomo, with views of the cathedral, is in where crowds would be harangued by him in his heyday Mussolini’s Arengario. It houses Milan’s museum of art.

Ascend the spiral ramp and start your exploration of chronologically arranged rooms, which take you from Volpedo’s powerful neo-impressionist painting of striking workers, Il quarto state, to the energetic job of futurist greats like Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Gino Severini, and Giacomo Balla. The collection continues before finishing pop art kinetic art and installments. It provides an amazing social opinion on Italy’s trajectory through fascism and in the dawn of their scientific era.

From where you may enjoy views of the Duomo, Besides the excellent set also houses a bistro on the next floor, Giacomo Arengario.

Fondazione Prada

Conceived by designer Miuccia Prada and architect Rem Koolhaas, this tradition is creative and as innovative. Seven renovated buildings and also three structures have transformed a century-old gin distillery into 19,000 sq meters of arousing exhibition space. The buildings, for instance, shimmering Haunted House clad in also a white coating and golden foliage, work seamlessly together, introducing some stunning visual viewpoints.

Exhibits fill the spaces that enable the display of the extensive contemporary range, including pieces by Francesco Vezzoli, Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor along with Nathalie Djurberg of this foundation. Film screenings, events, and performances will also be part of this program.

Nearly as popular because the exhibits are that the Wes Anderson– a constructed cafe, Bar Luce, having its wallpapered 1950s-inspired interior, filled with a jukebox, themed pinball machines and pops of candy jars. The 6th-floor Torre restaurant is also worth a stop, notably for its skyline views.

Villa Necchi Campiglio

Designed by homegrown talent Piero Portaluppi, this exquisitely restored 1930s villa was commissioned by Pavian heiresses Nedda and Gigina Necchi (of the Necchi sewing-machine empire), also Gigina’s husband Angelo Campiglio. As it has been completed the trio have been owners of a house that embodied’fresh’ luxury, complete with electronic shuttering, central heating along with a swimming pool. The commingling of art-deco and rationalist styles of portaluppi powerfully evokes the modernist imaginings of Milan. However, purists will lament renovations favored architect of the bourgeoisie, by Tomaso Buzzi.

Piazza Gae Aulenti

Join sailors sightseeing in this square named after Italy’s most famous female architect. Even the linchpin of Milan’s Porta Nuova regeneration job, the piazza curves around a huge reflecting pool and can be ringed with magnificent modern structure, for example Cesar Pelli’s Unicredit Tower and Michele de Lucchi’s pod-like pavilion with Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale observable across Studio Giorgetta’s’Library of Trees’, a new park motivated by botanic gardens.

Casa Museo Boschi-di Stefano

Milan’s most eccentric tradition of 20th-century Italian painting is packed in a 1930s flat that still gets the appearance of the Haute-bourgeois home it was. It’s the nostalgically Campigli and art struck, with the energetic brush-strokes propelling painting towards futurism of Boccioni and de Chirico; and the expressionist Informels.

Bosco Verticale

Stefano Boeri’s’Vertical Forest’ includes two apartment blocks whose many fortified balconies overflow with approximately 700 trees and 20,000 plants and trees. The award-winning, renewable design not just creates enormous amounts of CO₂, but it also helps to mitigate pollution and also mild inner temperatures and noise. The job was so powerful that Boeri is designing a forest city in Liuzhou, China.

Gallerie d’Italia

This fabulously decorated palazzo (mansion) is home to part of this monumental group of Fondazione Cariplo and Intesa Sanpaolo bank, which pays homage to 18th- and – 19thcentury Lombard painting. From a magnificent sequence of bas-reliefs by Antonio Canova to glowing Romantic masterpieces by Francesco Hayez, the works interval 2-3 rooms and record Milan’s significant contribution to the rebirth of Italian sculpture, the patriotic romanticism of this Risorgimento (reunification period) and the arrival of futurism at the dawn of the 20th century.

Parco Sempione

Parco Sempione was the help of hunting Sforza dukes. Then Napoleon came to town and set concerning landscaping. First the French carved-out orchards; second they mooted the concept in 1891 of a public playground that was vast. It turned out to be a success, and Milanese of all ages come to enjoy its twisting trails and ornamental ponds, today. Giò Ponti’s 1933 steel tower, built for a Triennale display that provides a fantastic 108m-high viewing stage over the playground.

Fondazione Feltrinelli

The very first properties in Italy, these two rickety of Herzog & de Meuron, slanted structures look reminiscent. Even the Feltrinelli Foundation, which occupies just one of many buildings, houses at least one of its namesake bookshops (available 8 am to 11 pm Monday to Friday, 9.30 am to 11 pm Saturday and Sunday), an excellent cafe, a dining room, and a conference/events space. The other construction is home to the Italian hub of Microsoft.

In the further shops, restaurants and pubs have been expected to open at the spaces. The elaborate’s greenhouse-like design is no denying: that the buildings were constructed on the site of a former nursery and take inspiration from Milan’s historical scene (farmsteads). Shark-tooth borders and with steeply pitched roofs, they bring a wonderful dose of modernity.

Chiesa di Santa Maria dei Miracoli e San Celso

This church’s Renaissance facade festooned with statues seems distinctly un-Milanese having its shiny Carrara marble and mannerist extravagance, however following the Duomo and Sant’Ambrogio it holds a unique place in Milanese hearts because of its miracle-performing, the 15th-century fresco of the Madonna and Child at the aisle. Indoors, luxury Renaissance frescoes by Appiani, Procaccini, and Bergognone give the interior technicolor newlyweds and glow still flock here to make a blossom bouquet of blossoms for a happy life together.

Next to the church, you’ll find one of the first chapels that stood on the website, where Saint Ambrose discovered Roman martyrs Nazaro and Celso’s bodies. It’s sometimes useful for art exhibits along with concerts.

Basilica di Sant’Ambrogio

St Ambrose, superstar bishop, and Milan’s patron saint are buried in the crypt with the palace, and he founded in AD 379. It’s a legacy, constructed and treated using a truly uplifting simplicity: the Lombard Romanesque basilica that is seminal. Shimmering altar mosaics and a biographical golden altarpiece (835), that worked as the cladding for its saint’s sarcophagus, light the dark brightly interior.

Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II

Therefore much more than a sports match, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II is a soaring structure of glass and iron. Nicknamed ‘il salotto di Milano’, the town’s drawing space, this has been at the center of city life since 1877. It’s famous for its high-end boutiques (the initial Prada store is located here) and equally lofty dining. While day packed it, you are given a chance to have its beauty by a stroll throughout the evening.

Take part in the inquisitive neighborhood convention of turning on this mosaic bull identified in the middle of the arcade’s balls with your heel. Thought to attract good fortune, it’s so popular that a pit was worn from the floor by which the balls of the (poor) bull used to be.

Chiesa di San Maurizio

Benedictine convent and this chapel is the hidden crown gem of Milan. Its somewhat musky facade belies a gorgeous interior, every inch covered from breathtaking frescoes, most of them implemented by Bernardino Luini, who worked together with Leonardo da Vinci. A number of the frescoes immortalize Milanese maven, Ippolita Sforza, and also members of those Sforza and Bentivoglio clans who covered the decoration of the chapel.

Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci

Children and would-be inventors will proceed goggle-eyed at Milan’s science museum, the largest of its kind. It is a fitting tribute at a city where arch-inventor Leonardo DaVinci did much of their finest work. The 16th-century monastery where it has housed comes with a group over 15,000 items, including models based on DaVinci’s sketches, together with outdoor hangars housing steam trains, planes, and Italy’s first submarine, Enrico Toti (tours offered in English and Italian).

Triennale di Milano

Place was taken by Italy’s earliest Triennale in 1923 at Monza. It aimed to advertise Italian style and style and applied arts, and its success resulted in the structure of Giovanni Muzio’s Palazzo d’Arte in Milan in 1933. Since that time, this display space has championed design in all its forms, although the formula was replaced with long yearly exhibits and shows.

In the garden, keep an eye out for de Chirico’s wacky Fontana dei Bagni Misteriosi (Fountain of all Mysterious Baths; 1973), designed for its 1973 Triennale. Additionally there is a slick-looking restaurant/bar in the floor, with scenic views of the park and also the Porta Nuova Sky Scrapers.

Biblioteca e Pinacoteca Ambrosiana

Certainly one of Europe’s earliest public libraries (assembled 1609), the Biblioteca Ambrosiana has been a sign of intellectual ferment compared to quiet scholarship. It houses more than one million volumes and nearly 40,000 manuscripts, including Leonardo da Vinci’s priceless collection of drawings, including the Codex Atlanticus. An art gallery — that the Pinacoteca — has been added. It shows Italian paintings from the 14th into the 20th century and magnificently features Caravaggio’s Canestra di Frutta (Basket of Fruit), which found both his livelihood and Italy’s ultrarealist customs.

Palazzo Clerici

The of this palace disguises the extravagant insides in Milan. It was possessed by a group of silk retailers that bankrupted themselves keeping up. Therefore notorious were the Clerici’s for parading around Rome on silver shod horses, which ambassador to the Holy See is remembered. Guided tours are offered once a month.

Basilica di Santa Maria delle Grazie

Begun by Guiniforte Solari at 1463, with later additions by Bramante, this Lombard church encapsulates the magnificence of their Milanese court of Ludovico Sforza and Beatrice d’Este. Articulated in fine brickwork and terra cotta, the building is robust but fanciful; its apse is composed by a masterful, drum-shaped do-me credited to Bramante, and its interior has been lined with frescoed chapels decorated by famous brands Bernardo Zenale, Antonello da Messina, Bramantino and Paris Bordone, a pupil of Titian.

Palazzo Reale

Empress Maria Theresa’s favored architect, Giuseppe Piermarini, gave this town hall and Visconti palace a neo-classical overhaul from the late 18th century. The supremely elegant interiors were all but destroyed by WWII bombs; the Sala delle Cariatidi remains unrenovated like a reminder of warfare indiscriminate destruction. Now the opulent palace hosts art shows that are blockbuster, bringing serious audiences to shows including artists as diverse as Caravaggio Escher and Arnaldo Pomodoro.

Museo Poldi Pezzoli

At the age of 24 Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli had inherited not just his family fortune, but also his mother’s love of art. After extensive travels by he took inspiration in European art trends, he switched his apartments into a series of themed rooms depending on the great art periods (the dark ages, early Renaissance, baroque and so forth ). Filled with Renaissance artworks that are big-ticket, these Sala d’Artista are wonderful artwork in their own right.

Chiesa di Santa Maria Presso di San Satiro

Here’s a escape on Via Torino from the Zara/Benetton/H & M maelstrom. Ludovico Sforza saw potential in this small church built on top of the mausoleum of martyr San Satiro and asked architect Donato Bramante to refurbish it in 1482. His dream wasn’t dampened by the job’s scale: a trompe l’œil–coffered niche on the shallow apse creates the setting to the altar mimics the Pantheon in Rome.

Torre Branca

Giò Ponti’s spindly 1933 steel tower (built-in two weeks flat to get a Triennale exhibition) provides a fantastic 108m-high viewing platform over Parco Sempione. Take up the lift at sunset, or during the night to see the city lights twinkle, and then lord it over the Cavalli Café crowd below.

Piazza degli Affari

Home to the Italian stock market (Palazzo Della Borsa), this square can be a famous hub of financial activity. But that’s not all it’s known for. In the center of the piazza is Milan’s most controversial public sculpture, Maurizio Cattelan’s L.O.V.E. (standing for liberty, Hatred, Vendetta and Eternity’). A four-meter-high fist with a raised middle finger, many believe it’s an announcement on the financial meltdown as it was erected after the financial collapse, even though the artist has refrained from commenting.

Arco della Pace

Situated at the edge of Parco Sempione is Napoleon’s arch. Designed by Luigi Cagnola in 1807, it echoes Paris’ Arc de Triomphe and marks the beginning of Corso Sempione, the main road that links Milan to Paris through the Simplon (Sempione) Pass. Paradoxically, thanks to Napoleon’s fall in 1814, its neoclassical facade was finished in 1838 using bas-reliefs not of Napoleon’s successes, as was planned, but with scenes from the Battle of Leipzig (1813), depicting his beat.

Last Updated on November 30, 2019 by Guide 4 Travelers