Overview to Milan: Travel Guide and Tourist Information
- Milan Information
- Eating & drinking in Milan
- Night life in Milan
- Getting around in Milan
- Things to do in Milan
- Where to stay in Milan
- Milan street map
Anyone visiting Italy full of romantic images might be a little disappointed by Milan at first sight. A thriving, industrial city in the northern plains of Italy, it’s a world away from the idyllic Tuscan villages. But that’s by no means to say that the city is without its charms.
What Milan might be found to lack in quaintness, it more than makes up for in sheer dynamism; it's a loud, busy and thoroughly modern city. Milan is ultimately a prosperous modern place given over rather more to style and good living than history and romance.
Home to some 1.3 million people, Milan is Italy's second largest city. It’s also the economic powerhouse of Italy and home to its world-renowned fashion industry. Inevitably, in a city where Giorgio Armani, Dolce and Gabbana, Prada and Versace are among the ‘local shopkeepers’, shopping assumes an almost religious meaning.
It’s fitting, therefore, that the Duomo Cathedral - the third largest church in Christendom - jostles for space with the Galleria Vittario Emanuele, a great ‘cathedral’ of shopping which is held to be the world's oldest shopping mall. The city’s priciest fashion district forms a ‘Golden Triangle’ (as it’s known) from Via Montenapoleone to Via Sant'Andrea and Via della Spiga.
If it’s something a little more affordable you’re looking for, the Corso di Porta Ticinese, which stretches out from the Piazza XXIV Maggio in the direction of the Duomo, is the place to head. Little boutiques that don’t quite fall into the city’s highest price brackets also line the Via Torino and the Corso Buenos Aires.
Scores of museums and art galleries are scattered across the city. It also boasts one of the most important opera houses in the world, the Teatro alla Scala. The Biblioteca Ambrosiana, meanwhile, features drawings and notebooks from Leonardo da Vinci among its collections – proof, if proof were needed, that Milan is about much more than just shops and superficiality!
