The essence of style

The enormous cathedral at the centre of Milan sprouts a fabulous collection of turrets, statues and opulent ornamentation. The Milanese laboured over their magnificent cathedral for five centuries and it reveals an eccentric mix of everything from Gothic to Baroque, with some startling modern stained glass.

You might say this was the opening salvo in the Milanese quest for style, beauty and culture, to which has been added world-class opera and palazzos full of outstanding art. Unlike many Italian cities, however, Milan didn’t just rest on its historical laurels, but rather its long relationship with culture is evoked in top-end fashion, cutting-edge furniture design and cool contemporary art too.

Milan is Italy’s financial hub and epicentre for the publishing, television and advertising industries, and is as noted for international trade fairs as museums. It isn’t quite the traditional Italy tourists like to imagine, but is a great place to go to get a feel for the realities and dynamism of modern Italy. 

Expect a Florence or Venice and you’ll be disappointed, but you may find modern Italians more interesting than dead Romans and Renaissance princes.

The museums are, admittedly, hard to beat. A former Pirelli factory in northeast Milan houses Hangar Bicocca, with gigantic contemporary artworks. If you’re a fan of Caravaggio, you can admire the painter’s work in the Ambrosiana Museum, while the Poldi-Pezzoli and Brera are two other art museums that rank among the best in Italy. To see the most famous artwork of all, head to fifteenth-century church Santa Maria delle Grazie, where Leonardo da Vinci’s fresco The Last Supper covers a wall.

Yet you don’t have to haunt museums to delight the eye in Milan. Head for Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II for a coffee, and watch people pass as they head home from work. The Galleria itself is art too – one of the world’s first shopping malls (opened in 1865) is topped by a glass roof and a cupola and its floor covered with mosaics depicting signs of the Zodiac.

The area around the Galleria is known as the Golden Quadrangle because it’s enclosed within four streets – Via Montenapoleone, Via Sant’Andrea, Via della Spiga and Via Gesù. This is one of the trendiest parts of the city, crammed with chic boutiques that deliver superlative shopping. Many of Italy's fashion leaders such as Ferré, Prada, Moschino and Versace have their studios and flagship stores here. The flamboyant rococo Dolce & Gabbana store is scattered with zebra-skin rugs, while the changing rooms feature gold thrones. Armani’s ultra-trendy three-floor shop comes in minimalist style and incorporates a sushi bar.

For mere mortals, prices are more affordable and designer knockoffs abound along the Corso Buenos Aires near the train station – just bring sharp elbows on a Saturday, when crowds can be daunting. 

You can also try large department store La Rinascente in San Bibila, a Milan institution where Giorgio Armani started his career as a window decorator’s assistant. You’ll find clothes and household goods at reasonable prices, with a fine view over the city to boot from its pastry-filled seventh-floor café. 

Apart from fashion, you’ll find marvellous perfumeries and shops selling Italian shoes, beautiful writing paper and fine china in Milan. After all, this is the hometown of leading design firms such as Alessi, Memphis and Frette that have put their mark on everything from chairs to kitchen knives and bed linen.

Via Montenapoleone should be the design destination of choice, with stores from Alessi, Frette and leading textile firm Etro. It’s also worth visiting Galleria Post Design on Via della Moscova – hard to decide whether the items on show are furnishings or sculptures – and Dilmos on Piazza San Marco, so avant-garde you might have to work out just where to sit on their chairs.

When done with shopping, head to Navigli district just south of Milan's city centre, draped over three canals that were once part of a former, much larger network that made landlocked Milan a significant port. The oldest, Naviglio Grande, dates from 1179, while later canals were designed by Leonardo da Vinci in the fifteenth century.

Now Navigli’s canal-side warehouses have been redeveloped to house eclectic design shops and artists’ studios. Street markets give the neighbourhood a lively atmosphere and restaurants, bars, jazz clubs and nightclubs draw locals to the canals during the evening. Adjacent Zona Tortona has become an epicentre of contemporary cool, centred on MUDEC museum, which displays ethnographic exhibits devoted to world cultures inside a startling zinc-and-glass building.

Finally, Milan is famous for music too as the home of Teatro alla Scala, the opera house more commonly referred to as La Scala. One of the world’s finest, it regularly attracts leading international opera stars during the December to May opera season. If you don’t see a performance, at least visit the small but endearing museum, which contains opera memorabilia that once belonged to Italian greats such as Verdi, Rossini and Puccini. You might even get the opportunity to spy on a rehearsal in progress on the opera stage.

All Milan is a stage, and its streets are as stylishly arranged as any opera set. The city’s barmen are as sleek as Armani models, its cafés chic as any gallery, the beautifully dressed windows of its fashion boutiques always theatrical. Enjoy the spectacle –Milan provides the ultimate combination of art and style.