Milan Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
46 free Milan trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Milan trivia quiz covers Italy's second city from its Celtic founding to its glass towers. It opens with the landmarks any visitor knows: the cathedral that took nearly six centuries to finish, the opera house that opened with a Salieri premiere, the refectory wall Leonardo painted, the shopping arcade with the bull mosaic worn down by spinning heels, and the castle that holds Michelangelo's last sculpture. From there it digs into history and daily life. Milan was capital of the Western Roman Empire, the place Constantine issued his edict of toleration, the seat of the Visconti and Sforza dukes, and the city Napoleon chose for his coronation as King of Italy. It rose against Austria in 1848, watched Mussolini launch his march on Rome and saw his body strung up in Piazzale Loreto. The quiz also takes in the two football clubs that share the San Siro, the fashion week founded in 1958, the 2015 Expo, the driverless metro, the vertical forest towers, and the food: saffron risotto, breaded veal cutlet and panettone. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Milan and its monuments, clubs and dishes, and each question links to the page that establishes it. Fifty questions, free, with an explanation after every answer.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Milan is the capital of which Italian region?
Lombardy
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.
Q 02What was Milan's name under the Romans?
Mediolanum
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.
Q 03For more than a century until AD 402, Milan was the capital of which state?
The Western Roman Empire
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.
Q 04Which emperor issued the Edict of Milan in AD 313?
Constantine
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.
Q 05Which 4th-century bishop is the patron saint of Milan?
Ambrose
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.
Q 06Which family, whose serpent crest became a symbol of Milan, ruled the city before the Sforzas?
Visconti
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.
Q 07Which old trade name is thought to have begun as a word for traders from Milan?
Milliner
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.
Q 08Which artist's last sculpture, still unfinished when he died in 1564, is displayed in Milan's Sforza Castle?
Michelangelo
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.
Q 09Milan Cathedral, begun in 1386, is a landmark of which architectural style?
Gothic
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.
Q 10Which American writer called Milan Cathedral 'a poem wrought in marble'?
Mark Twain
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.
Q 11What tops the highest spire of Milan Cathedral?
The Madonnina statue
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.
Q 12Which opera composer founded a retirement home for musicians in Milan, where he and his wife are buried?
Giuseppe Verdi
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.
Q 13Who was crowned King of Italy in Milan Cathedral in 1805?
Napoleon Bonaparte
Q 21For luck, what do visitors do on the mosaic bull in the floor of Milan's Galleria?
Spin on its testicles
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.
Q 22Which American city bought retired 1928 trams from Milan to run on its historic streetcar line?
San Francisco
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.
Q 23What is the local name for Milan's system of canals?
Navigli
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.
Q 14Which unfinished Puccini opera premiered at La Scala?
Turandot
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.
Q 15Which composer's opera Europa riconosciuta opened La Scala in 1778?
Antonio Salieri
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.
Q 16Who conducted the concert that reopened La Scala in May 1946 after wartime bombing?
Arturo Toscanini
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.
Q 17Leonardo's The Last Supper is painted on the wall of which building?
Santa Maria delle Grazie
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.
Q 18Which patron commissioned The Last Supper?
Ludovico Sforza
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.
Q 19What was the main reason The Last Supper began flaking within decades of its completion?
An experimental painting technique
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.
Q 20Milan's glass-roofed Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II is what kind of building?
Shopping arcade
Shopping arcade. Its architect, Giuseppe Mengoni, fell to his death from the scaffolding in December 1877, just before the completed building was inaugurated.
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.
Q 24What happened to Milan's inner ring of canals around 1930?
It was covered over
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.
Q 25Which classic Italian novel describes the plague that devastated Milan in 1630?
The Betrothed
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.
Q 26The Five Days of Milan in 1848 was an uprising against which power?
Austria
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.
Q 27Mussolini waited in Milan in October 1922 while which event unfolded?
The March on Rome
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.
Q 28In which Milan square was Mussolini's body displayed in April 1945?
Piazzale Loreto
Piazzale Loreto. The square was chosen on purpose: fifteen Milanese had been shot there the previous August, and their bodies left on public display.
Q 29Milan's 1906 world's fair celebrated which new Alpine rail tunnel?
Simplon
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.
Q 30What was the theme of Expo 2015 in Milan?
Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life
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.