A home football match for AC Milan takes place at the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza, known to most as San Siro, a vast double-tiered concrete stadium on the western edge of the city that the club shares with its great cross-town rival Internazionale. The ground holds around seventy-five thousand spectators and is one of the largest stadiums in Italy. Opened in 1926 and named for the longtime AC Milan player Giuseppe Meazza, who joined Inter as well, the stadium has been progressively expanded over alm.....

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.....

A long, low Romanesque silhouette beside the canals of the old Navigli district, the Basilica of Sant Eustorgio in Milan was founded according to tradition in the fourth century by Bishop Eustorgius and is best known for its association with the relics of the Three Magi, brought to Milan from Constantinople by the bishop himself. The present brick basilica is the result of a major twelfth-century rebuilding on the early Christian foundations, with three aisles separated by tall pillars and culm.....

Marketed from Milan as a day-trip adventure, the Bernina Express is the famous Alpine train route that climbs from Tirano in northern Italy across the Bernina Pass into Switzerland, ending at the elegant ski resort of Saint Moritz. The line was built between 1908 and 1910 and was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2008 as part of the Rhaetian Railway in the Albula and Bernina Landscapes. The route is operated by the Rhaetian Railway, with its red panoramic carriages that have become a s.....

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.....

Hidden behind the famous Brera Pinacoteca in central Milan, the Orto Botanico di Brera is a small but historically important botanical garden tucked into the heart of one of the busiest districts of the city. Founded in 1774 under the reforms of the Austrian empress Maria Theresa, it was attached to the Jesuit and later imperial school that occupied the Palazzo Brera. The garden was originally created for the teaching of medical and pharmaceutical botany, with formal beds laid out for the syste.....

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.....

Built into the modern Casa Milan headquarters in the Portello district north-west of central Milan, the Mondo Milan museum is the official museum and trophy room of the AC Milan football club. Designed by the architect Fabio Novembre and opened in 2014, the building serves as both the corporate base of the club and a showcase of its history. The museum interactive route covers the more than one and a quarter centuries of the club existence, from its foundation by English expatriates in 1899 as .....