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Milan sits on a plain with no useful river, which ought to have made it a minor place. Instead it dug. The Naviglio Grande opened in 1179 to reach the Ticino, and when the Duomo needed pink marble hauled down from Candoglia in the Alps, the canals carried it, exempted from customs by decree. By the sixteenth century more than 150 kilometres of waterway were bringing in grain, timber and cattle. Milan built itself a coastline and got rich running it.
The vast Gothic cathedral that took roughly six centuries to finish, faced in pink-white Candoglia marble. The detail that explains the city: the cathedral works has held quarrying rights at Candoglia since the fourteenth century and still does, so the building is repaired with stone from the same seam it was built from.
The glass-roofed arcade of 1865 to 1877 linking the cathedral square to La Scala, and arguably the ancestor of every shopping mall since. In the central octagon, look down: visitors grind their heel into the testicles of a mosaic bull for luck, wearing a hole in the floor that has to be repeatedly repaired. The bull is Turin's coat of arms, not Milan's.
The Dominican refectory holding Leonardo's mural, painted in the 1490s in an experimental technique that began deteriorating almost immediately. On 15 August 1943 Allied bombing destroyed much of the building. The wall carrying the painting had been sandbagged and survived a high-explosive bomb that landed around eighty feet away.
What remains of the canal network, now two surviving stretches lined with bars. Most of the system was covered over in the twentieth century, so the water you see is a fragment. Leonardo worked on this network for Ludovico Sforza, designing lock systems to handle the altitude difference between Milan and the lakes.
The brick fortress of the dukes who ran Milan through its richest period, and the reason Leonardo was in the city at all. He arrived in 1482 at Ludovico Sforza's invitation, pitching himself primarily as a military and hydraulic engineer. The castle holds his ceiling fresco in the Sala delle Asse and Michelangelo's unfinished final sculpture.
The opera house of 1778, built on the site of a demolished church that gave it its name. Its reputation rests less on the building than on its audience: the loggionisti in the upper gallery are famous for booing singers off the stage, and a debut here is treated as a genuine trial rather than a formality.
A sixteenth-century church covered wall to ceiling in roughly 450 frescoes, by Bernardino Luini among others, and locally called the Sistine Chapel of Milan. It is free and usually close to empty. It sits a few minutes from the Duomo, where people queue for hours, which is the most useful thing to know about it.
A working cemetery laid out in 1866 where Milan's industrial families competed through funerary sculpture, producing an open-air gallery of art nouveau and futurist monuments. It reads as a portrait of who had money and wanted it recorded. Entry is free and it is one of the least visited significant sites in the city.
The state art collection, assembled substantially from religious houses suppressed under Napoleonic rule, which is why so much of it is altarpieces removed from churches elsewhere in Lombardy. The gallery exists because of confiscation. That origin is not hidden, but it is rarely the first thing anyone tells you about it.
Milan's cathedral owns a mountain quarry and has for six centuries.
The Duomo's works has held rights to the Candoglia marble quarry since the fourteenth century, so repairs come from the same seam as the original stone. Barges carrying it down the canals were exempted from all customs duty by decree.
A landlocked city built 150 kilometres of shipping lanes.
Milan has no significant river. The Naviglio Grande was dug in 1179 to reach the Ticino, and by the sixteenth century the network carried grain, wine, cattle and timber into a city that had manufactured its own access to water.
The Last Supper survived a bomb that landed eighty feet away.
Allied bombing on 15 August 1943 wrecked much of Santa Maria delle Grazie's refectory. The wall bearing Leonardo's mural had been sandbagged in advance and came through it, which is the only reason the painting exists.
Tourists have worn a hole in a bull's genitals for luck, and it is the wrong city's bull.
The mosaic in the Galleria's octagon is Turin's coat of arms, one of four representing cities of the Kingdom of Italy. Visitors spin on their heel on it for good fortune, and the floor has to be restored repeatedly as a result.
Leonardo came to Milan as an engineer, not a painter.
He arrived in 1482 at Ludovico Sforza's invitation and worked on the canal network, including lock systems to manage the height difference between Milan and the lakes. The painting was the side business.
There is a church covered in 450 frescoes a few minutes from the Duomo, and nobody is in it.
San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore is decorated floor to ceiling by Luini and others and is locally nicknamed Milan's Sistine Chapel. Admission is free and the queues that define the cathedral do not exist here.
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