Museums & History

⚠️ Almost everything here closes on Monday

Start with that, because it decides the week. The Castello museums, the Pinacoteca di Brera, the Monumentale and most of the rest are shut on Mondays. A Monday in Milan goes to the churches, the streets and the canals — all of which are open and most of which are free.

The collections worth the day

• Pinacoteca di Brera — Mantegna's foreshortened dead Christ, Piero della Francesca's Montefeltro altarpiece, Caravaggio, Hayez. The best single room of Italian painting in the north.
• Castello Sforzesco — one ticket for all its museums, including Michelangelo's unfinished Rondanini Pietà, which is shown alone.
• The Pinacoteca Ambrosiana — ⚠️ a different gallery from Brera, on the other side of the Duomo, with Caravaggio's fruit basket and Leonardo's Codex Atlanticus.
• Museo del Novecento, on the Duomo square, for twentieth-century Italian art and a window looking straight at the cathedral.
• Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia — the largest science museum in Italy, with a hall of machines built from Leonardo's drawings. ⭐ The one to take children to.

⭐ And the free one that beats several of them

The Cimitero Monumentale is an open-air sculpture museum of a century of Italian art, it costs nothing, and most visitors never go. Take the map they give you at the gate.

Milan before Milan

This was Mediolanum, capital of the western Roman empire for about a hundred years from 286, and the place where Constantine's edict of toleration was issued in 313. The Colonne di San Lorenzo and the mosaics in the chapel behind them are the largest pieces of that still above ground, and both are free.