A near-perfect snapshot of the historicist taste of late nineteenth-century Milan, the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum occupies the family palace in the fashion quarter around Via Montenapoleone. The mansion was the home of the brothers Fausto and Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi, two aristocratic collectors who from the 1880s remade their family residence as a fantasy of a sixteenth-century Lombard nobleman home, filling it with paintings, weapons, tapestries and furniture from the Italian Renaissance. The.....

Founded in 379 AD by Saint Ambrose, the great bishop of Milan, the Basilica of Sant Ambrogio is one of the oldest churches in the city and one of the most important Romanesque buildings in northern Italy. The current structure dates largely from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, rebuilt on the lines of the early Christian basilica. The exterior is dominated by a broad atrium, an open colonnaded courtyard in front of the church that recalls the early Christian custom of separating the catechum.....

Founded in 1609 by Cardinal Federico Borromeo, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana was one of the first public libraries in Europe and remains one of the most important repositories of manuscripts and early printed books in Italy. The institution sits in a quiet square in central Milan and houses, alongside the library proper, a notable picture gallery known as the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana. Cardinal Federico, cousin of the more famous Saint Carlo Borromeo, modelled his library on the great humanist collecti.....

A slender steel lattice piercing the trees of the Parco Sempione in central Milan, the Torre Branca rises just over a hundred and eight metres above the park and offers one of the best views over the city. Designed by the great Italian architect Gio Ponti and built in only sixty-eight days, the tower was inaugurated in August 1933 for the fifth Milan Triennale. The tower height was carefully calibrated by the regime of the time to fall a few centimetres short of the gilded Madonnina on top of t.....

Begun in 1456 as a hospital for the poor of Milan, the Ca Granda, or Great House, is one of the most remarkable surviving Renaissance buildings in the Lombard capital and now serves as the main seat of the University of Milan. The complex was founded by Duke Francesco Sforza and his wife Bianca Maria Visconti as a single great hospital to consolidate the many smaller charitable institutions of the medieval city. The original design was the work of the Florentine architect Antonio Averlino, know.....

Begun in the mid fourteenth century by the Visconti lords of Milan and substantially rebuilt a century later by Francesco Sforza after he established the Sforza dynasty, the Castello Sforzesco is the great red-brick fortress on the northern edge of central Milan, one of the largest urban castles in Europe and a symbol of the city for more than six centuries. The current outline of the castle dates largely from the 1450s, when Francesco Sforza commissioned the architect Filarete to design a powe.....

A nearly two-kilometre straight commercial street running northeast from the Porta Venezia to the Piazzale Loreto, Corso Buenos Aires is one of the longest and busiest shopping streets in Europe, with more than three hundred and fifty shops along its length. The street name commemorates the historical ties between Milan and the Argentine capital, home to a large Italian diaspora in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The route follows the line of the old Roman road that left the city throug.....

A short pedestrian street linking the Piazza del Duomo with the Piazza San Babila, Corso Vittorio Emanuele II is one of the busiest commercial streets in Milan, packed with shoppers from morning until late evening and lined with the flagships of Italian and international high-street brands. The route follows the line of a much older medieval street, the Corsia dei Servi, that connected the cathedral with the eastern city gates. The current pedestrianised character of the street dates from 1985,.....

Beneath the unassuming pavement of the small Piazza San Sepolcro in central Milan lies one of the oldest sacred spaces in the city, the crypt of the church of Santo Sepolcro. Often described as the very centre of historic Milan, the crypt preserves a remarkable late Romanesque interior that survives largely as it was when first consecrated in 1100 by Anselmo da Bovisio, archbishop of the city. The crypt sits directly above what was once the principal Roman forum of Mediolanum, the place where t.....

Rising above the central square that bears its name, the Duomo di Milano is the largest church in Italy after Saint Peter Basilica in Rome and the third largest in the world, a great pinnacled and statue-encrusted Gothic structure that took almost six centuries to complete. Construction began in 1386 under the orders of the Visconti duke Gian Galeazzo and was declared complete only in 1965, when the last bronze door was installed in the facade. The cathedral occupies the site of the much earlie.....