46 Fun Facts About Milan

Milan is the capital of which Italian region?

Lombardy. The name comes from the Lombards, a Germanic people who took Milan in 569 but made nearby Pavia the capital of their Italian kingdom.

What was Milan's name under the Romans?

Mediolanum. Rome captured the town in 222 BC, and its name, usually read as 'in the middle of the plain', wore down over the centuries into Milano.

For more than a century until AD 402, Milan was the capital of which state?

The Western Roman Empire. Co-emperor Maximian set up court in Milan in the late 3rd century, and it stayed until 402, when the Visigoths besieged the city and Honorius moved to Ravenna.

Which emperor issued the Edict of Milan in AD 313?

Constantine. He was in Milan for his sister's wedding to his co-emperor Licinius, and the two rulers agreed there to let Christians and everyone else worship as they pleased.

Which 4th-century bishop is the patron saint of Milan?

Ambrose. He was the Roman governor sent to keep the peace at a disputed election in 374 when the crowd began chanting for him as bishop, though he had not yet been baptised.

Which family, whose serpent crest became a symbol of Milan, ruled the city before the Sforzas?

Visconti. When the last Visconti duke died without a son in 1447, Milan tried three years as a republic before the mercenary captain married to his daughter seized power.

Which old trade name is thought to have begun as a word for traders from Milan?

Milliner. It was probably first 'Milaner', a dealer in the ribbons, bonnets and other finery shipped from the city, and only later narrowed to hats.

Which artist's last sculpture, still unfinished when he died in 1564, is displayed in Milan's Sforza Castle?

Michelangelo. He was still carving the Rondanini Pietà six days before he died at 88, and had cut away so much of an earlier version that one of its arms hangs free beside the figures.

Milan Cathedral, begun in 1386, is a landmark of which architectural style?

Gothic. The style was a northern import, so Milan called in master masons from France and Germany to help build it, and the work went on for nearly six centuries.

Which American writer called Milan Cathedral 'a poem wrought in marble'?

Mark Twain. He raved about the cathedral in The Innocents Abroad, then called The Last Supper a 'mournful wreck' and mocked the tourists who pretended to admire it.

What tops the highest spire of Milan Cathedral?

The Madonnina statue. By tradition nothing in Milan may stand higher than her, so when skyscrapers overtopped the cathedral, small copies of the statue were set on their roofs.

Which opera composer founded a retirement home for musicians in Milan, where he and his wife are buried?

Giuseppe Verdi. He left the home the royalties from his operas but asked that nobody move in until he had died, and he called it the favourite of all his works.

Who was crowned King of Italy in Milan Cathedral in 1805?

Napoleon Bonaparte. Days before the ceremony he ordered work restarted on the cathedral's facade, which had stood unfinished for nearly two centuries, and it was completed within a decade.

Which unfinished Puccini opera premiered at La Scala?

Turandot. Puccini died with its final duet unwritten, so on opening night the performance stopped where his own music ended; the ending heard today was completed from his sketches.

Which composer's opera Europa riconosciuta opened La Scala in 1778?

Antonio Salieri. He was 27 and won the commission with the backing of his friend Gluck; the opera then went unperformed until it reopened the restored house in 2004.

Who conducted the concert that reopened La Scala in May 1946 after wartime bombing?

Arturo Toscanini. He had refused to play the Fascist anthem and stayed away from Italy's podiums under Mussolini, so the reopening concert was his homecoming, at 79.

Leonardo's The Last Supper is painted on the wall of which building?

Santa Maria delle Grazie. An Allied bomb wrecked the convent's dining hall in August 1943, but the end wall with the painting, shielded by sandbags, stayed standing.

Which patron commissioned The Last Supper?

Ludovico Sforza. He meant the convent church to be his family's burial place, but the French drove him from Milan soon after the painting was finished, and he died their prisoner.

What was the main reason The Last Supper began flaking within decades of its completion?

An experimental painting technique. To allow slow reworking, Leonardo used tempera on a dry wall instead of fresco's wet plaster, and the paint was flaking within twenty years.

Milan's glass-roofed Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II is what kind of building?

Shopping arcade. Its architect, Giuseppe Mengoni, fell to his death from the scaffolding in December 1877, just before the completed building was inaugurated.

For luck, what do visitors do on the mosaic bull in the floor of Milan's Galleria?

Spin on its testicles. Custom calls for three turns on one heel, and so many people do it that the bull, taken from Turin's coat of arms, wears into a hole and has to be relaid.

Which American city bought retired 1928 trams from Milan to run on its historic streetcar line?

San Francisco. Milan's 1920s trams were copies of an American design, the Peter Witt car, so the Italian fleet crossed the Atlantic to do the job its originals no longer could.

What is the local name for Milan's system of canals?

Navigli. The oldest, the Naviglio Grande, was dug in the Middle Ages and then linked to the centre so that barges could deliver the marble for the cathedral.

What happened to Milan's inner ring of canals around 1930?

It was covered over. The ring had begun as the moat of the medieval walls; the city filled it in under a town plan, and a loop of streets now follows its course.

Which classic Italian novel describes the plague that devastated Milan in 1630?

The Betrothed. Milan-born Alessandro Manzoni rewrote it in the speech of Florence, 'washing his clothes in the Arno' as he put it, and its prose became a model for standard Italian.

The Five Days of Milan in 1848 was an uprising against which power?

Austria. After five days of street fighting behind barricades, Marshal Radetzky pulled his garrison out of the city, but his army marched back in that August.

Mussolini waited in Milan in October 1922 while which event unfolded?

The March on Rome. He never marched: he stayed in Milan until the king asked him to form a government, and only then set off for the capital.

In which Milan square was Mussolini's body displayed in April 1945?

Piazzale Loreto. The square was chosen on purpose: fifteen Milanese had been shot there the previous August, and their bodies left on public display.

Milan's 1906 world's fair celebrated which new Alpine rail tunnel?

Simplon. The fair was planned for 1905, when the tunnel was due to be finished, and was put back a year after work on the bore, nearly 20 km long, ran late.

What was the theme of Expo 2015 in Milan?

Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life. Milan's second world's fair opened to street protests and tear gas in the city centre, yet some 22 million people went on to visit its food pavilions.

Milan co-hosted the 2026 Winter Olympics with which resort?

Cortina d'Ampezzo. The 1956 host shared these Games, the first officially awarded to two cities, so the flame burned in two cauldrons at once, one in each.

AC Milan was founded in 1899 by an expatriate of which nationality?

English. Herbert Kilpin of Nottingham was the main founder, which is why the club is still 'Milan' rather than 'Milano', a spelling it used only when the Fascist regime forced it to.

As of 2026, which club alone tops AC Milan's seven European Cups?

Real Madrid. Milan's seven include the 1994 final, when a side missing both first-choice centre-backs through suspension beat the favourites, Barcelona, 4-0.

Which businessman bought a nearly bankrupt AC Milan in 1986 and appointed coach Arrigo Sacchi?

Silvio Berlusconi. He poured money in, signed the Dutch trio of Gullit, van Basten and Rijkaard, and in 1989 Milan were champions of Europe for the first time in two decades.

Inter was founded in 1908 by members who left AC Milan because they wanted the club to sign more of whom?

Foreign players. That is what the full name records: the rebels called their club Internazionale, 'because we are brothers of the world'.

As of 2025, which is the only club never to have been relegated from Italy's top football division?

Inter Milan. Juventus could say the same until 2006, when a match-fixing scandal sent the club down to Serie B for the first time in its history.

The San Siro stadium is officially named after which player?

Giuseppe Meazza. He starred for Inter for 13 years but also wore AC Milan's shirt, and the ground both clubs share took his name in 1980, months after he died.

What is the San Siro's nickname?

La Scala del calcio. The nickname borrows the name of the city's opera house; the two rival clubs have shared this stage since 1947, and in 2025 they bought it from the city.

Which spice gives risotto alla milanese its yellow colour?

Saffron. Legend has it that a glass painter at work on the cathedral's windows, who used the spice as a yellow pigment, tipped some into the rice at a wedding feast.

Cotoletta alla milanese is traditionally a breaded cutlet of which meat, fried in butter?

Veal. The chop is fried on the bone; Milanese cite a banquet menu of 1134 listing 'chops with bread' as proof of its age, though nobody knows if that bread was a coating or a side dish.

Which sweet Christmas bread is associated with Milan?

Panettone. Legends credit a baker or kitchen boy called Toni, hence 'pan de Toni', but dictionaries trace the word to panetto, a small loaf, with an ending that makes it a big one.

What covers the facades of Milan's Bosco Verticale apartment towers?

Trees and shrubs. The two towers carry about 800 trees, and their architect says the idea came from an Italo Calvino novel about a boy who climbs into the branches and never comes down.

Which company built Milan's landmark skyscraper designed by Gio Ponti?

Pirelli. The tyre maker's tower went up on the site of one of its old factories, and in 2002 it survived a small private plane flying into its upper floors.

Which newspaper, founded in Milan in 1876, is one of Italy's oldest?

Corriere della Sera. The name means Evening Courier, because it began as an evening paper: newsboys cried the first issue in the streets at nine on a Sunday night.

Which carmaker, founded in Milan in 1910, ran a giant factory at nearby Arese until the 2000s?

Alfa Romeo. Arese was its biggest plant from the 1960s, but after Fiat bought the company production drifted to other factories, and the last engine left the line in 2005.

Milan was founded around 600 BC, long before the Romans arrived, by which people?

Celts. The Roman historian Livy tells of a Gaulish prince, Bellovesus, who was sent over the Alps with the surplus of his overcrowded homeland and founded the town.