Tickets for the Last Supper go on sale in blocks a few months ahead and the good slots are gone within hours. Twenty-five people go in at a time, for fifteen minutes, through a sequence of climate-controlled chambers that strip the dust off your clothes before you reach the room. If you have not booked, you are not getting in, and no amount of queueing at the door changes that.

The rest of Milan does not need booking, and the city is far better than its reputation as a place people pass through on the way to somewhere prettier.

The Duomo, and going up it

Construction started in 1386 and the last gate was hung in 1965, which is 579 years. The building carries around 3,400 statues and 135 spires, all in pink-white Candoglia marble brought down from a quarry 100 kilometres away by canal, a supply the cathedral works still owns.

Inside is dark and enormous and holds a statue of St Bartholomew from 1562 in which the saint carries his own flayed skin over his shoulder like a coat, and the anatomy is exact.

But the ticket to buy is the roof. You walk out among the spires on the marble terraces, between flying buttresses at arm’s length, with the Alps visible to the north on a clear winter day. There are stairs and there is a lift, priced differently, and the stairs are 251 steps.

Go at opening or in the last hour. The terraces face full sun and there is no shade on them at all.

The Galleria and the bull

Next door, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II is a glass-roofed arcade from 1877 that Milan calls its drawing room, with Prada’s first shop still trading in it since 1913.

On the mosaic floor under the dome there is a bull, and the tradition is to put your heel in a particular spot on the bull and spin three times for luck. The spot has been worn through to a hole so many times that the city keeps replacing the tile. It is silly, everyone does it, and there is usually a short queue.

The Last Supper, if you did book

Leonardo painted it between 1495 and 1498 on a dry wall in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, using an experimental technique instead of true fresco, and it began flaking within twenty years of completion. It has been restored at least seven times. The last restoration ran from 1978 to 1999, twenty-one years, and removed most of what earlier restorers had added.

What is left is fragile and pale and about 20 per cent original paint, and it is still one of the few paintings that rearranges what you thought you knew about a scene you have seen a thousand times.

The refectory was hit by a bomb in August 1943 and the wall survived behind sandbags while the rest of the building came down.

Tickets are 15 euros as of the check in September 2026, which is 13 for entry and a compulsory 2 for the time slot, and they are sold through the official site. Third-party sellers bundle it into guided tours at three times the price, which is legal and is often the only way in at short notice.

The castle, and the last thing Michelangelo touched

Castello Sforzesco sits at the top of the shopping street and looks like a fortress because it was one, rebuilt in 1450 by Francesco Sforza on the ruins of an earlier one the citizens had torn down in a fit of republican feeling. The courtyards are free to walk through, and most people do exactly that and go no further.

Inside, in a bare room of its own, is the Rondanini Pietà. Michelangelo was working on it in the last days of his life in February 1564, at 88, and you can see him changing his mind in the stone: an arm from the abandoned first version still hangs there, detached from the figure it belonged to.

The museums in the castle are one combined ticket and free on the first Sunday of the month, when they are also full.

Aperitivo, which is dinner

Between roughly six and nine, bars across the city put out food with the drinks. You pay for one drink, typically 10 to 20 euros in the centre on September 2026 prices, and the food is included: olives and crisps in a modest place, a full buffet of pasta, rice, cured meat and vegetables in the Navigli bars.

It is not a starter before dinner. For a great many Milanese under thirty it replaces dinner entirely, and doing the same is unremarkable.

Order a Negroni Sbagliato if you want the local accident: a bartender at Bar Basso around 1970 reached for the wrong bottle and put prosecco in a Negroni instead of gin. Bar Basso still makes it and still has the queue.

The Navigli are the two surviving canals of a network that once ran through the whole city, partly engineered by Leonardo, and mostly paved over in the 1930s. The remaining stretches are where the evening happens.

Two things people miss

The Cimitero Monumentale is a free open-air sculpture museum where Milan’s industrial families competed over tombs from the 1860s onward, and some of the results are extraordinary and slightly deranged. It closes on Mondays.

The Pinacoteca di Brera holds Mantegna’s foreshortened dead Christ and Piero della Francesca’s Montefeltro altarpiece, and it is quiet on a weekday morning in a way the Uffizi never is.

Milan is the junction rather than the destination, which is its own argument for staying a night: Venice is two and a half hours east, Florence about the same going south. Through the Alps, Zurich is three hours north.

Book the trip you have just read about

These are the companies we use ourselves, and what each one is actually good at.

Provider	Best for	Go to provider
	Hotels & apartments The widest choice of places to sleep, and the Genius discount starts on booking number one. Read our Booking.com review	Check hotel prices at Booking.com
	Flights Live fares from airlines and booking sites side by side, one-click booking, and a refund guarantee you can add to any ticket. Read our Soar review	Check flight prices at Soar
	Whole homes A front door of your own, with a kitchen and a washing machine, for a weekend or a month. Read our Airbnb review	Check homes at Airbnb
	Luxury hotel perks Breakfast for two and a 4pm checkout at more than 1,900 hotels — if you hold the card. Read our American Express Travel review	See the hotels at American Express Travel
	Flight + hotel packages Flight, hotel and car in one basket, on one bill, with one rewards balance across three brands. Read our Expedia Group review	Check package prices at Expedia Group
	All-inclusive holidays Plane, hotel, transfer and excursions under one contract, with one number to call when it goes wrong. Read our TUI Group review	Check holiday prices at TUI Group
	Small-group tours Groups capped at around twelve, led by somebody who lives in the country you are walking through. Read our Intrepid Travel review	Check tour prices at Intrepid Travel
	Tailor-made itineraries A route drawn for you alone, by a company that has been drawing them since 1758. Read our Cox & Kings review	Request a quote at Cox & Kings
	Reviews & things to do Check what other travellers actually found, before the money leaves your account. Read our Tripadvisor review	Read the reviews at Tripadvisor