5 Days in Milan

The Duomo took almost six centuries: work began in 1386 and the final details weren't finished until 1965. The marble came from the Candoglia quarry, which Gian Galeazzo Visconti gave the cathedral works exclusive rights to, and it traveled about 105 km to the city along the Naviglio Grande on boats marked ad usum fabricae, which let them skip the tolls. In 1805 Napoleon ordered the facade finished.

Inside, look for Saint Bartholomew Flayed, Marco d'Agrate's 1562 statue of the saint wearing his own skin like a cloak, to the left of the altar, and the small red light high above the apse that marks a nail said to come from the Cross. Then go up. The terraces put you among 135 spires, and the golden Madonnina stands on the tallest one at 108.5 m. From the square the facade looks a bit like a fussy wedding cake, so the roof is the real show.

Walk straight through the arch at the north side of the square. The Galleria is Italy's oldest active shopping arcade, designed in 1861 and built between 1865 and 1877 by Giuseppe Mengoni. He never saw it open: he fell from the highest scaffolding on 30 December 1877, the day before the inauguration.

Look down as well as up. The octagon under the glass dome has floor mosaics with the coats of arms of Turin, Florence, Rome and Milan, and tradition says that spinning on your heel on the Turin bull brings luck, which is why it has a hole that has been restored more than once. The old tenants are the point: Biffi Caffè from 1867, Savini restaurant from the same year, the Borsalino hat shop from 1883. Window-shop, don't sit down for lunch under the arches.

Two minutes from the Galleria, down Via Santa Radegonda, is a bakery whose own site says forno dal 1888. It sells panzerotti, half-moons of dough filled with mozzarella and tomato, baked or fried, that you eat on the street while they're still too hot to bite.

The line usually moves faster than it looks. Order one baked and one fried if you can't choose. It's a quick, cheap lunch before an afternoon of museums.

On the other side of the cathedral square from the Galleria, the Palazzo dell'Arengario has housed the Museo del Novecento since December 2010. It's a collection of 20th-century art, about 400 works and mostly Italian. The headline is Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo's Il Quarto Stato (1902), the marching workers, along with the Futurists Boccioni, Balla and Carrà, rooms for De Chirico, Fontana and Morandi, and a room of foreign artists with Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky and Mondrian.

It's the most manageable museum in town, and the restaurant-bar on the top floor looks out over the square. It's closed on Mondays.

La Scala opened on 3 August 1778 with Salieri's Europa riconosciuta, designed by Giuseppe Piermarini after a fire destroyed the old ducal theater in 1776. It was built on the site of a church called Santa Maria della Scala, which is where the name comes from. Allied bombing in 1943 wrecked it, and it reopened on 11 May 1946 with a concert conducted by Arturo Toscanini.

The museum next door is open every day from 9:30 am to 5:30 pm, with the last entry at 5 pm, and the ticket lets you look into the auditorium from the third-order boxes, as long as there is no rehearsal or performance. Don't count on it: the better way to see the hall is with a ticket for the evening.

The aperitivo is Milan's real institution: a drink before dinner with something to eat alongside, usually between about 6 and 9 pm. Start at Camparino in the Galleria, which bills itself as the home of the Milanese aperitivo since 1915.

Stand at the bar for a Campari-based drink, a Negroni or a Spritz. It costs more than a side-street bar because you pay for the setting, but it's the postcard version of Milan.

Whether you go depends on the calendar, so check it before you book the trip. Tickets are sold on the official site, with seat selection and a preview of the view. They're registered in your name and can't be refunded or exchanged, except when a performance changes date or is cancelled. Sales for each production open on a published date, normally at 1 pm.

The 2026/27 season opens on 7 December 2026 with Otello, on the feast of Saint Ambrose, Milan's patron saint, with Don Giovanni and La bohème in February and March 2027 and The Nutcracker from 17 December. The box office at Largo Ghiringhelli is open Monday to Saturday, 1 pm to 6 pm.

The Last Supper fills a wall of the old refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, about 4.6 by 8.8 m. Leonardo painted it around 1495 to 1498 for Ludovico Sforza, not in true fresco but in tempera on gesso, pitch and mastic, which let him keep changing his mind and is a big part of why so little of the original paint survives. A doorway was cut through the bottom in 1652, French troops stabled horses in the room in 1796, and on 15 August 1943 an Allied bomb hit the refectory. Sandbags saved the wall. The restoration led by Pinin Brambilla Barcilon took 21 years and finished in 1999.

Visits last 15 minutes, in groups of up to 40 people. It's short, and it's enough: every figure reacts to the moment Jesus says one of them will betray him.

Booking is the whole game, and it's mandatory for everyone, children included. Tickets go on sale in quarterly batches about three months ahead: the September to December 2026 batch opened on Tuesday 23 June 2026 at 12:00, and the museum announces the next date on its news page. Extra tickets are released online every Wednesday at 12:00 for the following week, for individual visitors only, up to five tickets. The ticket carries your name, and neither the name nor the time can be changed.

Ten minutes' walk from the Last Supper is the church many Milanese love more than the cathedral. Sant'Ambrogio was commissioned by Saint Ambrose himself between 379 and 386. The Romanesque building began around 1080. Ambrose is Milan's patron saint, and La Scala opens its season on his feast, 7 December.

Go in for the golden altar made between 824 and 859 by Volvinius, and the crypt, where Ambrose and the martyrs Gervasius and Protasius are buried. Look for the old white marble column known as the Devil's Column: the story goes that the two holes in it were made by the Devil's horns when he failed to tempt Ambrose. It's far quieter than the Duomo.

The Castello Sforzesco began as a 14th-century Visconti fortress and Francesco Sforza rebuilt it in the 15th century. By the 16th and 17th it was one of the largest citadels in Europe, and Luca Beltrami rebuilt much of what you see between 1891 and 1905. Leonardo worked for the Sforza here, and his decorated room, the Sala delle Asse, is closed to the public for restoration.

One ticket covers every collection for the whole day: the old art and the armory, the furniture, the picture gallery, the musical instruments, the Egyptian gallery and the Pietà Rondanini. The courtyards are free every day, 7 am to 7:30 pm. Don't try to see everything: pick two collections, plus Michelangelo.

The Rondanini Pietà is the last thing Michelangelo made. He worked on it from 1552 until the last days of his life in 1564, and he's said to have carved for hours just six days before he died. He hacked at the marble until only Christ's dismembered right arm survived from the original design, and what's left are two long, thin figures leaning into each other.

It lives in its own museum inside the castle, opened in 2015, which is included in the museum ticket. It's unfinished and it's the best contrast in Milan to the crowds at the Duomo: walk around it and look at it from more than one side.

Walk out through the back of the castle and you're in Parco Sempione, and at its far end stands the Arco della Pace, the triumphal arch at what was once the Porta Sempione, one of the city's seven gates. The gate looks toward the Simplon Pass, hence the name, and the current arch was built in the early 19th century.

A loop through the park and a look at the arch is a pleasant hour, and the first thing to drop if the day runs long.

Brera is the district of cobbles, galleries and the art school, ten minutes' walk from the castle. The big building at its center started as a convent that passed to the Jesuits in 1572 and was rebuilt by Francesco Maria Richini in 1627 and 1628. Today it's home to the art academy, the Braidense library and the Pinacoteca, which you'll visit tomorrow.

Tonight just walk. The lanes around Via Brera and Via Fiori Chiari fill up in the early evening, and the small bars put out tables. It's one of the nicest places for a drink, and one of the more expensive. Have one here and eat elsewhere.

This trattoria on Viale Pasubio has been serving since 1880 and is a Locale Storico d'Italia, Italy's label for historic businesses. It stands where goods coming into the city were once weighed to pay the toll at the old Porta Comasina, today's Porta Garibaldi, and the owners say they have kept the majolica stoves, the old floor and the old signs. Its own site notes that Ho Chi Minh worked here and slept in the same building in the 1930s.

The menu is Lombard: order ossobuco con risotto alla milanese, which the menu lists as one dish, and you'll have eaten the city's two signature dishes in a single meal. Booking is sensible.

The Pinacoteca di Brera is Milan's main picture gallery, a collection that grew out of the Brera Academy, founded in 1776. It opened as the Reale Pinacoteca on 15 August 1809, Napoleon's birthday, and it remains one of the foremost collections of Italian painting from the 13th to the 20th century.

The highlights fit in two hours. Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin (about 1504), Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus (1606), Mantegna's foreshortened Lamentation of Christ (about 1480), Piero della Francesca's Holy Conversation (about 1472 to 1474) and, at the end, Francesco Hayez's The Kiss (about 1859), the most reproduced image of Italian Romanticism. In 2024 the modern wing opened at Palazzo Citterio, a short walk away, completing the Grande Brera project.

Ten minutes south-east of Brera is Via Montenapoleone, the spine of the Quadrilatero della Moda, where the big Italian fashion houses have their flagship shops. You don't have to buy anything: the windows are the show.

For a coffee and a pastry, Caffè Cova dates from 1817, when it opened beside La Scala, and now sits at number 8. Pasticceria Marchesi, which dates its history to 1824, has a shop at Via Monte Napoleone 9. Stand at the bar for a quick cappuccino, and look at the panettone, the Milanese Christmas cake.

A short walk north-east, the Giardini Pubblici are an 18th-century park in the English Romantic style, with water features, statues, a planetarium and the natural history museum.

Sit on a bench, rest your feet and watch the Milanese. With children, the natural history museum is a good rainy-day stop.

Porta Nuova takes its name from a neoclassical city gate of 1810, but today it's the new business district, and the reason to come is the skyline. Piazza Gae Aulenti is a circular plaza at the foot of the UniCredit Tower, the tallest skyscraper in Italy, with shops and restaurants around it.

The honest verdict is that it looks like any rich business district, only cleaner. Come for the 20 minutes at dusk, when the lights go on and the reflections run along the glass, then move on to the park next door.

The Bosco Verticale is two residential towers, 116 m and 84 m, designed by Stefano Boeri's studio and inaugurated in 2014. Their balconies carry more than ninety species of trees, shrubs and plants, and the idea is to green the city vertically. It won the International Highrise Award in 2014. They are private apartments, so you look from the outside.

The best view is from the street and from the Biblioteca degli Alberi, a public park next to the towers, good for an evening stroll.

Cross the railway behind Porta Garibaldi and you're in Isola, whose name means island and is usually explained by the tracks that once cut it off from the rest of the city. It's now one of the best places in Milan for an evening: small bars, wine bars and restaurants, and a crowd younger and less touristy than Brera.

Pick a bar with people at the door and a plate of snacks coming out: a Negroni or a glass of wine, with cured meats, cheese and bruschetta. Corso Como, back toward Porta Garibaldi, is the glamorous, clubbier choice.

The Ambrosiana is a library and a picture gallery in one old palace, and the reason it's on this list is Leonardo: the library owns the Codex Atlanticus, which its own site calls the largest collection of Leonardo da Vinci's writings and drawings, with machines, cranes and rotating guns among thousands of pages. Only a few sheets are ever on show, so check what's on display before you go.

The Pinacoteca is the picture gallery, about 90 minutes, and the crypt about 30. It's quieter than the Pinacoteca di Brera.

A few minutes' walk from the Duomo, on Via Torino, a Renaissance church built between 1476 and 1482 hides one of the best tricks in Italian architecture. There wasn't room behind the altar, because Via Falcone runs right behind the church, so the choir is only about 90 cm deep and the rest is painted perspective: a trompe-l'oeil that makes the apse look many meters long. The usual attribution is to Donato Bramante, though recent documents suggest Giovanni Antonio Amadeo did most of the work.

Stand in the nave and look at the apse, then walk forward and watch the illusion collapse. Next to the church is the Sacello di San Satiro, a small early medieval shrine.

South of the center, along Corso di Porta Ticinese, a row of Roman columns stands in front of the Basilica of San Lorenzo. The columns date from the 3rd century and are the most visible piece of Roman Milan, and the bars around them are where the aperitivo crowd gathers in the evening.

The basilica behind was built between the late 4th and early 5th centuries, though the exact date is uncertain, which makes it one of the oldest churches in the city. The octagonal Chapel of Sant'Aquilino has 4th-century mosaics, including a Christ the Lawgiver. The dome collapsed on 5 June 1573 without casualties, and Martino Bassi rebuilt it by 1619. A park joins this church to Sant'Eustorgio.

The Basilica of Sant'Eustorgio is named for the bishop who is credited with bringing the supposed relics of the Three Magi from Constantinople to Milan in 344. In the 12th century, after Milan was sacked by Frederick Barbarossa, the relics were taken to Cologne. Fragments of bone and cloth came back in 1903 and 1904 and lie in an altar near the empty Three Kings sarcophagus. The bell tower is topped by a star instead of a cross, in memory of them.

Behind the apse the Portinari Chapel (1462 to 1468), a Renaissance jewel with frescoes by Vincenzo Foppa, is the reason for the ticket, and it's one of the best small museum tickets in the city.

A short walk west is the Darsena, the old port, built in 1603, and the start of the Navigli, the canal system that once carried goods and the Duomo's marble into the city. The Naviglio Grande is the biggest of them. The inner ring of canals was covered over between 1928 and 1930, which is why Milan has so few canals today.

Walk along the Naviglio Grande toward sunset, and turn into the Vicolo dei Lavandai, the old washhouse lane. On the last Sunday of every month, the Naviglio Grande hosts an antiques market with more than 400 exhibitors, so if your dates are flexible, that's the day to come.

The Navigli district is where Milan comes to eat and drink on a Friday night, with bars and restaurants along both banks of the canal, open until late. There's a concentration of aperitivo bars here and around the Colonne di San Lorenzo.

Pick a side street rather than the canal itself, where the views are good and the snacks often aren't. Look for a bar where the plate arriving at the next table looks good, and order a Negroni Sbagliato or a Spritz. It's loud and young on Fridays and Saturdays.

The Accademia Carrara is in the lower town, a 20 to 30 minute walk from the station, and it's the reason to come first and go up later. It was founded in 1796 by Giacomo Carrara, and the entire collection comes from bequests. It covers Italian art from the Gothic period to the 19th century, with Pisanello, Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Raphael, Botticelli, Lorenzo Lotto and the Bergamo painters Moroni and Fra Galgario. It reopened in January 2023 after a long renovation.

You can finish it in under two hours. Since 2024, the gardens in front of it have been a free public space with a bistro.

The reason to come is the upper town on the hill. The funicular between the two towns has run since 1887, and it's part of the city transport system, so it uses a normal ATB ticket, from the station machines or the ATB Mobile app.

The ride takes a few minutes and drops you at the top of the old town, a short walk from the main square. A second funicular goes on up to San Vigilio, with a castle ruin and a park.

Bergamo's old square is the center of Città Alta, the Piazza Vecchia, with the Palazzo della Ragione, the city's medieval seat of government, and the Biblioteca Civica Angelo Mai. It's small and calm compared with the cathedral square in Milan.

Walk Via Bartolomeo Colleoni, known as the Corsarola, the main street of the upper town, which leads on toward the cathedral and the basilica.

Santa Maria Maggiore began in 1137 on the site of a 7th-century church and was added to until the 15th century. Next to it, the Colleoni Chapel is a Renaissance church and mausoleum with a richly decorated polychrome marble facade, built in the 15th century for the condottiero Bartolomeo Colleoni, whose tomb is inside.

The chapel is the stop you shouldn't skip. Both places are small, and together they take 45 minutes. It's the best-looking corner of the upper town.

Bergamo has a food claim of its own. On Largo Colle Aperto, La Marianna is where the gelato flavor stracciatella was invented in 1961 by Enrico Panattoni, who melted dark chocolate into churning fiordilatte so it broke into irregular pieces. Since 2017 it has been the official flavor of the city, according to the café's own site.

Pair it with a savory lunch: casoncelli (stuffed pasta) or polenta is the local dish, and in a Bergamo pastry shop polenta e osei means a cake, a sponge with a yellow almond paste topping and chocolate birds, nothing to do with the roasted birds served with polenta elsewhere in Italy.

The upper town is encircled by the Venetian walls, built in the 16th century and listed by UNESCO on 9 July 2017. Four of the city gates through the walls survive. Follow them on foot and you look out over the plain below the hill.

A slow loop on the walls, then the funicular down and the train back to Milan.