Everybody has been in Milan, but who knows Milan? The traveller in search of the picturesque and mediæval sees nothing to arrest him—except comfortable hotels—in a city which seems to tell only of yesterday. A glance at the Cathedral, at St. Ambrogio, at the most famous of the pictures, and he hurries on. Yet a little longer stay reveals a wealth of artistic interest in the many fine churches, in the rich galleries and museums, and much also that is worth learning even in the outward aspect of t

Milan is to-day the most modern of Italian cities. Her Risorgimento in the last century, accomplished with the pouring out of blood and the efforts of a strenuous virtue, makes for her a mighty and sufficing past in the near background, and she seems to stand wholly on this side of it, triumphant and new-create. Neither Nature nor the further centuries have, you feel, any longer part in her. Who of the numberless travellers from the North, as they lose the vision of mountain, lake and green cham

The revolt of the Milanese people against the nobles was associated with the great agitation for the reform of the Catholic Church, initiated and carried on in the eleventh century by S. Giovanni Gualberto, San Romualdo and his disciple, Peter Damiano, and by the Cluniac monk, Hildebrand, afterwards Gregory VII. This movement had its political aspect. The spiritual supremacy to which these men aimed to restore the dishonoured and discredited Papacy included domination over the temporal powers. T

After the blows and humiliation which the Milanese Church suffered in the eleventh century from the united attack of Rome and the people, it was no longer able to stem the popular movement towards freedom. Throughout the long civil war the incipient Republic had been developing and gradually limiting, more and more, the domination of the archbishop and the nobles. This process, which was being repeated everywhere in Lombardy, was greatly favoured by the weakness of the Empire during the long min

So wrote a Milanese chronicler in the sixteenth century. Had the people but one mind, he adds, assuredly no city would be more pleasant and fortunate than theirs. His complaint holds equally good for the thirteenth century. The presence of a foreign invader did indeed produce a temporary union of heart and hand, and so far the earlier generations show a noble contrast to their descendants of three hundred years later. But even while Frederick II. was still in the land, and in response to opportu

The Visconti had now firmly established their dominion in Milan, a dominion destined, in the story of the unstable mediæval governments of Italy, to be equalled by few in duration, and by none in extent. For good or for evil the great city, with her command of the chief passes of the Alps for war and commerce, her wealth as the capital of the vast alluvial plain of Lombardy, was delivered into the hands of a race singularly fitted to use these natural advantages for the creation of a mighty Stat

Gian Galeazzo’s three sons by Isabella of Valois had died in infancy, leaving him with one daughter only, Valentina, whom in 1387 he had married to the Duke of Orleans, brother of Charles VI. of France, an alliance of immense immediate advantage to the Visconti, but of fatal issue for Milan and Italy generally, in days beyond even his far vision. After some years of marriage, his second wife, Caterina Visconte, had borne him a son, whom he had named Giovanni Maria, decreeing that every one of hi

If the great movements of history could ever be said to turn on the existence of an individual, one might regard as the paradoxical result of Galeazzo Maria’s death the loss of Italy’s freedom. The young Milanese Brutus, in his noble rage against tyranny, little foresaw the three centuries of dark and hopeless servitude which by the unimpassioned workings of fate his blow would indirectly bring upon his country. The exclamation of the cynical Sixtus IV. at the news of the murder— To-day is the p

At Novara, Milan lost her independence for ever. The restoration of the Sforza, witnessed twice over in the first thirty years of the sixteenth century, was a mere puppet-show, barely concealing the hand of greater Powers behind. The Gascon archers, who from the Castello walls amused themselves by shooting to fragments the great clay model of ‘the Horse,’ had ruined as effectively the fair social fabric, as unique, as fragile, and as incomplete, which Leonardo’s work symbolised in the person of

The Milanese as a people do not take a great place in the story of Italian art. They show at no time the spontaneous artistic character which was the blessed birthright of the Florentines, Sienese, Umbrians, Venetians. They granted, however, splendid hospitality to the art of others. Talent of every kind was attracted to this wealthy and luxurious city, and the concourse of foreign artists roused and developed considerable industry in the natives from early times. Lombardy, and in particular Mil

In Milan, as we see the city to-day, modernised, commonplace, characterlessly handsome, there is one great redeeming thing—the Cathedral. Other churches there are, greater and more beautiful in every sense except size, but they are smothered in the dull drift of everyday buildings. The Duomo, as is befitting, has a supreme position. It is the heart of the city, the converging point of all the far-coming ways, the irresistible magnet for the eyes of the myriads thronging those ways. It rises up i

In a quiet plebeian quarter, remote from the bustle of the city, surrounded by a wide piazza and a pleasant grove of lime-trees, stands the old basilica of St. Ambrogio. It is reached in a few minutes from the Duomo by the S. Vittore tram. This church, architecturally and historically, ranks first among all in Milan. The Duomo, foreign in material and bastard in style, cannot compare in interest with this grand product of the Lombard soil and the Lombard spirit. The story of St. Ambrogio reaches

In the Via Ticinese, just within the twelfth century boundary of the city, there stands a magnificent row of Corinthian columns, the only vestige above ground, in its original position, of the imperial Milan, whose splendours were sung by Ausonius. The Roman building of which they formed probably the peristyle, has long vanished, but the place where it must have stood is now occupied by San Lorenzo, the most ancient existing church in Milan, though much restored and altered, especially in the si

A campanile here and there about the city, as for example those of S. Gottardo and S. Marco, already described, the richly decorated belfry of St. Antonio—near the Ospedale Maggiore—and but little else, remains in Milan of the graceful Gothic brick building of the period, early fourteenth century, when Azzo Visconte beautified the city with many new edifices. The Duomo stands as the great monument of Gian Galeazzo Visconte’s time, half a century or so later. DOORWAY OF PALAZZO BORROMEO From the

The Palazzo di Brera contains one of the finest collections of pictures in Italy. The palace itself, once the house of the great order of the Umiliati, and after them of the Jesuits, who in their turn were dispossessed by the State in 1772, is in its present form a grandiose seventeenth century building, with a double galleried cortile of fine proportions. In the midst of the cortile stands a statue of Napoleon Buonaparte, by Canova. The Biblioteca Nazionale occupies part of the building. There

The Poldi-Pezzoli Art Museum contains an admirable collection of pictures of the greatest period of Italian art, and artistic treasures of various kinds, and one has the added pleasure of seeing these things in the harmonious surroundings of a luxurious house. The very sound of the water pleasantly dripping from the fountain in the hall as we enter is a promise of refreshment and delight. The palace and the collections were the generous legacy of the Cavaliere Poldi-Pezzoli to the city, and it r

In the west of the city a vast red brick building, towering against the sky, closes the wide vista of the modern Via Dante. It stands for that storied stronghold and palace of the Visconti and Sforza, the Castello di Porta Giovia, whose rapidly vanishing remains, mutilated, ruined and buried beneath the additions and incrustations of five centuries of changing circumstance, have been very recently dug out and restored and rebuilt into the present interesting semblance of the fifteenth century or

The following is a list of the trams and ways to the various places of interest. The trams start from the Duomo. St. Ambrogio (p. 256 ), San Vittore tram. Palazzo di Brera (p. 335 ) and S. Marco (p. 296 ) (street on right), Porta Volta tram. S. Lorenzo (p. 278 ), Colonne di S. Lorenzo (p. 278 ) and St. Eustorgio (p. 284 ), Porta Ticinese tram. Monastero Maggiore (p. 320 ) and S. Maria delle Grazie (p. 310 ), Porta Magenta ( Maddalena ) tram. S. Simpliciano (p. 295 ) and S. Maria Incoronata (p. 3