Milan, Italy
Duomo di Milano · DWOH-moh dee mee-LAH-noh
A mountain of pinkish-white marble with 135 spires and 3,400 statues, begun in 1386 and declared finished in 1965. The workshop that built it has never closed. You may walk on the roof.
Photo: kuhnmi, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
You come up out of the underground into a wide open square, and one side of it is a cliff of pale stone cut into points. There are spires on the gables, spires on the buttresses, spires on the spires, each with a small figure standing on top. In the morning the stone is grey-white. Towards evening it turns the colour of the inside of a shell.
The first stone was laid in 1386. In China it was the nineteenth year of the first Ming emperor; in England Chaucer was about to begin The Canterbury Tales.
The church, the roof and the museum are sold together or apart. The cheapest way to see the roof is to climb.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The square and the outside | Free |
| The cathedral and the museum | 8 euros |
| The roof terraces, by the stairs | 16 euros alone; 22 euros with the cathedral |
| The roof terraces, by the lift | 26 euros with the cathedral |
| The archaeological area under the square | With the fast-track pass, 32 euros |
| The crypt of St Charles | With the fast-track pass |
| The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II | Free; a public arcade |
Milan in 1386 belonged to the Visconti family, who wanted a church to match the great cathedrals of France and Germany. Italy built in brick. The duke gave the builders a whole mountain of marble near Lake Maggiore, a hundred kilometres away, and the blocks were floated by lake, river and canal into the middle of the city.
A body called the Fabbrica, the Works, was set up the next year to manage the money and the masons. It is still there, in the building behind the cathedral, and still owns the quarry. Every stone that wears out is replaced with a new one from the same mountain.
The church was in use within thirty years. The dome took a century, the great spire four centuries, the front more than four, and the last bronze door was hung in 1965. In Milan anything that never ends is said to be "as long as the building of the Duomo".
"It is the largest church in Italy after St Peter's." St Peter's is in the Vatican, which is another country. This is the largest church in Italy.
"The front is medieval." The lower windows and doors are of the 1600s, in a different style. The rest of the front was finished in a hurry between 1805 and 1813, because Napoleon was coming to be crowned.
"The gold figure at the top is an angel." She is the Virgin Mary, four metres tall. Milanese call her the Madonnina, the little Madonna.
"The marble is white." It is veined with pink and grey, and it weathers badly. Some part of the building is always under scaffolding, and always will be.
"It is free, like most churches in Italy." Visitors pay. People who come to pray enter free by a separate door.
The stops begin in front, go once round the outside, then in, down, and up.
Until the 1860s the cathedral stood among crowded houses and could not be seen whole. The square was cleared when Italy became one country, and the glass-roofed arcade on the left was built to join it to the opera house.
Stand back and count the storeys of windows in the front. The cathedral is 108 metres high to the top of the gold figure, and for centuries it was the custom that nothing in Milan might stand higher. When the first tall office tower went up in the 1950s, a small copy of the Madonna was put on its roof, and each taller tower since has taken the copy over.
The five bronze doors were made between 1906 and 1965. The centre one tells the life of the Virgin. Low down on it, at the height of a hand, one panel shines like gold: it shows the whipping of Christ, and a leg of one of the men has been rubbed bright by visitors for luck.
Look also for the dents and tears in the bronze. They are from the bombs of August 1943, which burned much of the city centre. The cathedral was hit but did not catch fire.
Walk down the left side to the back. This end is the oldest. The three windows of the apse are each as tall as a seven-storey house.
Every block came by water. It was loaded on a barge at the quarry, floated down the lake and the river, and brought by canal to a basin a few hundred metres from here. Each was marked A.U.F., "for the use of the Works", and passed every toll gate without paying. Milanese still say "a ufo" for anything got free.
Inside it is dark and very large. Fifty-two pillars, one for each week of the year, rise twenty-four metres. At the top of each, where other churches have a simple capital, is a ring of niches with a statue in every niche.
Just inside the main door a strip of brass runs across the floor and three metres up the left wall. It was laid by astronomers in 1786. At noon a spot of sunlight from a hole in the roof crosses it, at a point that tells the day of the year. The city set its clocks by it.
In the right arm of the church stands a marble man with no skin. Every muscle and vein is shown. What looks like a cloak over his shoulder is his own skin, with the face hanging at his back. He is St Bartholomew, who was skinned alive.
It was carved in 1562, when artists were first cutting up bodies to learn how they worked. The sculptor signed it on the base: "Not Praxiteles but Marco d'Agrate made me." Praxiteles was the most famous sculptor of ancient Greece.
Stand in front of the high altar and look up into the vault above it. There is a small red light, forty metres up. It marks a nail said to be from the cross of Christ.
Once a year, on the Saturday nearest 14 September, the archbishop is hoisted up to it in a basket shaped like a cloud, painted with angels, and brings the nail down for three days. The lift is worked by hidden ropes. Tradition gives the design to Leonardo.
The windows behind the altar are among the largest of stained glass anywhere. The oldest panels are of the 1400s.
A stair near the main door leads down under the front steps, to the foundations of the churches that stood here before. Among them is an eight-sided pool of the fourth century, where the people of Roman Milan were baptised.
On the night before Easter in 387 the bishop, Ambrose, baptised in it a teacher of rhetoric from North Africa, thirty-two years old. He was Augustine, whose Confessions are still read.
The lift or 250 steps bring you out on the lower roof, in a lane between the buttresses. The roof is paved with slabs of the same marble as the walls, and slopes gently, so that you walk up the middle of the church as up a hill.
Here the statues are at arm's length. There are saints, bishops and prophets, and among them carvings added by masons of the last hundred years: boxers, a tennis racket, the faces of people they knew. The long stone monsters leaning out are rain spouts.
The great spire went up in 1769 and the Madonna in 1774. She is made of copper plates over a frame, covered with gold leaf. On a clear day, with your back to her, you can see the Alps.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 387 | Augustine is baptised on this spot | Eastern Jin (317–420) China (317–420); the monk Faxian will set out for India twelve years later |
| 1386 | The cathedral is begun | Ming China (1368–1644), the Hongwu reign; Chaucer begins The Canterbury Tales |
| 1418 | The high altar is consecrated | The Yongle reign: Zheng He is on his fifth voyage; Brunelleschi wins the contest for the dome of Florence |
| 1487 | Leonardo makes a model for the dome | Ming China, the last year of the Chenghua reign; five years before Columbus sails |
| 1774 | The Madonna is set on the spire | Qing China, the Qianlong reign; two years before the American Declaration of Independence |
| 1805 | Napoleon is crowned King of Italy here | The Jiaqing reign in China; the battle of Trafalgar is fought the same year |
| 1943 | Bombs fall on the square | The Second World War |
| 1965 | The last bronze door is hung | Chinese scientists make insulin in the laboratory for the first time |
Films from official channels, played from YouTube. Nothing is loaded until you press play.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
The devil came to the Duke of Milan in a dream and offered to spare his soul if he would build a church covered with images of Satan. That is why the cathedral has ninety-six monsters leaning from its walls.
Source: Milanese popular tradition
The mother of the emperor Constantine found the cross of Christ and its nails. She had one nail beaten into a bit for her son's horse, to keep him safe in battle. That bit is the relic in the vault.
Source: St Ambrose, funeral sermon for the emperor Theodosius (395)
A dragon called Tarantasio lived in a lake south of Milan and ate children. The first Visconti killed it, and put a snake swallowing a child on his shield. You will find that snake carved on the cathedral, and on the badge of a Milanese motor car.
Source: Lombard legend, recorded from the fourteenth century
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. The cathedral works' own ticket site (ticket.duomomilano.it), ticket types and prices as shown in November 2026.
Checked 2026-11-12
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