In Milan, the ticket is the plan.

What it is

Milan is Italy’s second city by population and its first by almost everything else — around 1.4 million people in the comune and something over three million in the built-up area, on the flat of the Po valley with the Alps an hour north.

It is the country’s financial centre, its fashion and design capital, and the city Italians move to for work. That is why it feels different from the rest of Italy on a first afternoon: it is busy, it is grey in winter, and it does not perform itself for visitors. The good part is behind the doors.

How it got here

This was Mediolanum, and for about a hundred years from 286 it was the capital of the western Roman empire — bigger and more important than Rome at the time. Constantine’s edict of toleration was issued here in 313. The sixteen columns outside San Lorenzo are the largest piece of that still standing.

The Visconti and then the Sforza ruled it as a duchy, built the castle, and in 1386 began a cathedral that would take four hundred and twenty-seven years to acquire a façade. Leonardo worked here for nearly twenty years — on the canals, on a horse that was never cast, and on a refectory wall.

Spain, then Austria, then Napoleon, then Austria again. The Five Days of Milan in 1848 threw the Austrians out for a fortnight and made the city the moral centre of Italian unification; the Galleria was built to celebrate the kingdom that followed.

Industry made it rich and the war flattened much of it — Allied bombing in 1943 took the roof off the refectory holding the Last Supper, which survived behind sandbags. The rebuilding was fast, cheap in places, and is why so much of the centre is post-war.

Then the miracolo economico, fashion in the 1970s and 80s, and since about 2010 a second rebuilding: Porta Nuova on railway land, the Darsena dug out and reopened, and a fourth and fifth metro line.

What it is known for

Milan is known for fashion and design, for the cathedral and the arcade beside it, for a refectory wall people book months ahead to stand in front of for a quarter of an hour, for aperitivo and for saffron risotto — and, among Italians, for working harder than the rest of the country and mentioning it.

What visitors remember is usually the contrast: a flat grey street with a shut door in it, and then the courtyard behind the door.