Where to Stay in Milan, Lombardia

What is Milan known for?

Milan is Italy's financial and fashion capital, a working northern city better known for its trades than its skyline. Fashion aficionados and international paparazzi fill it for the spring and autumn fairs. The Borsa Italiana keeps the money moving.

Opera lives at La Scala, football at the great clubs, design at the Triennale di Milano. Milan is the second-most populous city in Italy after Rome, and sits at the centre of the country's largest metropolitan area, yet its pleasures are worldly rather than monumental: shopping, the opera season, the long ritual of the evening drink.

What are the main landmarks in Milan?

Milan Cathedral crowns the city with its forest of marble pinnacles. It is the one sight no visitor skips. A short walk away, Santa Maria delle Grazie holds Leonardo's Last Supper on its refectory wall, drawing a booked-out queue year round.

The brick Sforza Castle guards the old core. Its courtyards open onto museums and parkland. Quieter marvels wait in the frescoed walls of San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore, the bone-lined chapel of San Bernardino alle Ossa, and the paleochristian columns of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, a heritage far older than the fashion houses.

What is the history of Milan?

Milan grew up on the Lombard plain of northern Italy as a marketplace and a seat of power, and its churches carry that long past in stone. The Basilica of San Lorenzo still stands on Roman-era columns, while Santa Maria delle Grazie and the great Milan Cathedral rose across the medieval and Renaissance centuries as dukes and archbishops competed to build. Power settled at the Sforza Castle, whose ruling houses drew artists to the city.

Leonardo among them. The modern city was scarred hard by the Second World War, when bomb raids destroyed much of the old fabric. Milan rebuilt itself into a business capital rather than a museum, and the postwar decades gave it the Torre Velasca and the collections of the Museo del Novecento.

Trade, banking and fashion filled the space that war had cleared. What survived the bombs, the churches and the castle, now stands among the offices and the fashion houses as the older layer of a working city, and the Basilica of San Lorenzo remains its oldest visible root.

Where is Milan?

Milan sits on the broad Lombard plain of northern Italy. As capital of Lombardia, it stands at the centre of the region's dense web of towns and rail lines rather than on any coast or great river, the flat farmland spreading south from the Alps toward the Po. No sea, no ridge.

The old canals, the Navigli, once linked the landlocked city to the waterways of the plain and still trace its southern quarters. Flat ground let it grow outward in rings from the Duomo.

What is the climate of Milan?

Milan has the humid climate of the Lombard plain, hemmed in by the Alps to the north, where damp fog settles over the flat land in the cold months and hangs low around the rooftops of the Duomo. Winters are grey. Summers turn hot and heavy, the still air of the plain trapping the heat between the tall blocks.

Spring and autumn run milder and shorter, the seasons that carry the great fashion fairs. Rain comes all year, keeping the parks around the Sforza Castle green.

How do you get to Milan?

Milan is the transport hub of northern Italy, the point where the country's rail and motorway lines knot together. Fast trains reach it from Rome and the other Italian cities, sliding into the grand halls of the central station. Two airports serve the area.

A smaller one sits close to the city for regional flights, while a larger one out on the plain handles the long-haul and European routes that make Milan a common first stop in the country. From the station, the metro and tram carry you to the Duomo and the Sforza Castle in minutes.