Milan Tourist Info

BRIEF PRESENTATION OF MILANO *from lonelyplanet.com

Ruled by the Caesars, Napoleon, the Austro-Hungarians and Mussolini, Milan has an ancient and fascinating cultural history. Mercantile Milan invented the idea of the city-state and the Edict of Milan (AD 313) ended the persecution of Christians. Art collections old and new mark the genius of Old Masters and provoke new conversations about where the world is headed.

Home of Italy's stock exchange, an industrial powerhouse and the internationally accepted arbiter of taste in fashion and design, Milan with its 1,339,622 inhabitants and its 181,8 km² is a seething metropolis. Prestigious nights at La Scala and an illustrious literary heritage are balanced by a diverse contemporary music and publishing scene. In short, Milan is so much more than the puritanically work-obsessed city it is often portrayed as.

Since Leonardo da Vinci broke all the rules in his stunning Last Supper, the indefatigably inventive Milanese seem to have skipped straight from the Renaissance to the 21st-century. Not only is Milan a treasure trove of 20th-century art, but art deco and rationalist architecture abound.

Today the city leads the way with the largest post-war re-development in Italy, impressive, sustainable architecture and a futuristic skyline modelled by Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind and César Pelli. And there’s more to come with ambitious plans to mould the city into a hi-tech hub, home to the likes of Google, Microsoft, Alibaba and Apple. [Of course, this raises important questions about togetherness and its discontents…]

MORE HISTORY *

Milan first stepped into the historical limelight in 313 AD when Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, granting Christians throughout the Roman Empire the freedom to worship for the first time. The city, under its charismatic bishop, Ambrogio (Ambrose), swiftly became a major centre of Christianity; many of today’s churches stand on the sites, or even retain parts, of fourth-century predecessors.

Medieval Milan rose to prominence under the Visconti dynasty, who founded the florid late-Gothic Duomo, and built the nucleus of the Castello – which, under their successors, the Sforza, was extended to house what became one of the most luxurious courts of the Renaissance. The last Sforza, Lodovico, commissioned Leonardo da Vinci in 1495 to paint The Last Supper.

Milan fell to the French in 1499, marking the beginning of almost four centuries of foreign rule, which included the Spanish, Napoleon and the Austrian Habsburgs. Mussolini made his mark on the city, too: arrive by train and you emerge into the massive white Stazione Centrale, built on the dictator’s orders. And it was on the innocuous roundabout of Piazzale Loreto that the dictator’s corpse was strung up for display in April 1945 as proof of his demise.

Milan’s postwar development was characterised by the boom periods of the 1950s and 1980s: the city’s wealth also comes from banking and its position at the top of the world’s fashion and design industries. Politically, too, Milan has been key to Italy’s postwar history. A bomb in Piazza Fontana in 1969 that killed sixteen people signalled the beginning of the dark and bloody period known as the Anni di piombo, when secret-service machinations led to over a hundred deaths from bomb attacks.

In the 1980s, corruption and political scandal once again focused attention on Milan, which gained the nickname Tangentopoli (“Bribesville”). The self-promoting media magnate Silvio Berlusconi – Italy’s longest serving prime minister since World War II – is also Milan born and bred. And despite having lost his political weight he maintains his power base in the city’s media conglomerates as well as still owning part of the football club AC Milan.

In 2015, Milan hosted Expo Milano 2015, which attracted an estimated twenty million visitors to the city and surrounding area. In preparation for the exhibition, the city centre was spruced up, with a number of new restaurants, museums and hotels opening.

*from the web site of roughguides.com

VISITING MILAN

Official Milan tourism website: http://www.comune.milano.it/wps/portal/ist/en

Public transport: http://www.atm.it/en/Pages/default.aspx

What’s on: http://vivimilano.corriere.it

Historical ‘bar’: Camparino, Galleria Vittorio Emanuele – painted by Umberto Boccioni in Rissa in Galleria and the meeting place of Italian artists and designers in 1960 ‘boom’ years; Bar Magenta, via Carducci 13 – charming café open in 1907 and meeting place of students old and new http://vivimilano.corriere.it/milano-al-top/100-pub-cocktail/

Itineraries:

• https://www.turismo.milano.it/wps/portal/poc?urile=wcm%3Apath%3ATUR_EN_ContentLibrary/sitecontent/organizzailviaggio/guideemappe/100Milano_1_9
• https://www.turismo.milano.it/wps/portal/poc?urile=wcm%3Apath%3ATUR_EN_ContentLibrary/sitecontent/organizzailviaggio/guideemappe/100Milano_10_18
• https://www.turismo.milano.it/wps/portal/tur/en/scoprilacitta/milanoatema
• https://www.comune.milano.it/wps/portal/ist/it/vivicitta/percorsitematici

Have you seen any of these movies about Milan?

• Cronaca di un amore (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1950)
• Miracolo a Milano (Vittorio De Sica, 1951)
• Rocco e i suoi Fratelli (Luchino Visconti, 1960)
• Fame chimica (Antonio Bocola and Paolo Vari, 2003)
• Io sono l’amore (Luca Guadagnino, 2009)
• L’ultimo pastore (Marco Bonfanti, 2012)
• Il capitale umano (Paolo Virzì, 2013)