Milan's Historic Core in Six Centuries

Duomo di Milano

The largest church in Italy, built of pink-white Candoglia marble over nearly six centuries. Its forest of spires dominates Milan's skyline.

You are standing in Piazza del Duomo, at the foot of a cathedral that took 579 years to finish. Work began in 1386 under Archbishop Antonio da Saluzzo, and the final bronze door was inaugurated on January 6, 1965. Look up. That is Candoglia marble, quarried from a single valley near Lake Maggiore and ferried here along the canals.

The Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo, the institution created in 1387 to manage construction, still maintains the building today. The cathedral's dimensions are staggering: it seats 40,000 people and holds more than 3,400 statues. The golden Madonnina atop the highest spire, installed in 1774, stands 108.5 meters above the street. Every Milanese landmark is measured against her.

Napoleon demanded the facade be finished for his coronation as King of Italy in 1805, and what you see is that rushed Neoclassical screen laid over centuries of Gothic bones. When you are ready, walk around to the left side of the cathedral to find the entrance to the terraces.

Terrazze del Duomo

Walk among the spires, flying buttresses, and carved saints on the Duomo's rooftop. The Alps are visible on clear mornings.

Take the stairs or the elevator up. You emerge into a marble forest of 135 spires, each one a vertical sculpture garden. The roof of the Duomo is the largest accessible Gothic roof in the world, a working stone landscape of flying buttresses, pinnacles, and carved figures so dense that from the piazza below they blur into lace. Up here you can walk right up to the Madonnina and see the copper plates beneath her gold leaf, weathered by more than two centuries of Milanese sun and smog.

The view stretches from the Alps in the north to the Apennines on a clear day. Directly below, Piazza del Duomo spreads like a map, and you can trace the route ahead: the triumphal arch of the Galleria, the sober facade of Palazzo Reale, and the spire of San Gottardo in Corte. When you descend, exit toward the Galleria entrance on the north side of the piazza.

Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II

Italy's oldest active shopping arcade, a soaring iron-and-glass cross vault built between 1865 and 1877. Milan's drawing room.

Step inside and look up. The central octagon rises 47 meters beneath a glass dome, the four arms of the Latin cross stretching away beneath barrel vaults of iron and glass. Architect Giuseppe Mengoni won the design competition in 1861 and spent twelve years building this. He never saw it celebrated.

On December 30, 1877, the day before the official inauguration, Mengoni fell to his death from scaffolding. Whether it was an accident or a suicide remains a mystery. The mosaics underfoot map the new Kingdom of Italy: Turin, Florence, Rome, and Milan represented in the central octagon. Find the Turin bull.

The ritual is to place your right heel on its groin and spin three times. The resulting hollow worn into the mosaic gets patched every few years, and the line of people waiting their turn tells you the tradition is alive. The Galleria earned its nickname, il salotto di Milano, because it is where the city comes to meet, to be seen, to drink a Campari at Camparino or a coffee at Biffi. Walk its full length and you emerge into Piazza della Scala.