Pinacoteca di Brera

The state picture gallery, upstairs in a seventeenth-century palazzo shared with an art academy and a botanical garden. Napoleon founded it as a place to put what his armies had collected, which is why a Milanese gallery holds so much of northern Italy.

Mantegna’s foreshortened dead Christ is here, and Piero della Francesca’s Montefeltro altarpiece with the egg hanging above it, and Caravaggio, and Hayez’s The Kiss.

What it costs

Ticketed. The courtyard of the palazzo and the botanical garden behind it are free, and the garden is one of the quietest places in the centre.

When to go

Weekday mornings. ⚠️ Closed on Mondays. Allow two hours; it is bigger than it looks from the stairs.

Getting there

Lanza on M2 or Montenapoleone on M3, then five minutes through Brera.

⚠️ Book this before you fly, not when you arrive. Milan’s best things are timed entry and the slots go long before the day. See Booking Ahead for what needs how much notice, and what to do when it has already gone.

If you only have an hour

Go straight to the Mantegna and the Piero, then work backwards. In an hour that is the honest version of this gallery.

What people get wrong

⚠️ People confuse it with the Ambrosiana, which is a different gallery on the other side of the Duomo with the Caravaggio fruit basket and Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus. Both are good; they are not the same place.