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Milan was already old when Rome conquered it. Celtic tribes had settled here around 590 BCE; the Romans arrived in 222 BCE, renamed it Mediolanum, and eventually made it the capital of the Western Roman Empire in 285 CE because the Po Valley was easier to defend from there than from Rome. By the Renaissance, the Duchy of Milan had accumulated enough power and money to attract Leonardo da Vinci, who spent seventeen years here and produced The Last Supper on the refectory wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie. The painting still sits there, slowly conserved, requiring a timed ticket and a fifteen-minute slot to view.

The Duomo took nearly five hundred years to build, from 1386 to 1877, and the result is a building with so many spires, pinnacles, and marble saints that it looks more like a fever dream than an act of architecture.

You can walk on the roof terraces between the statues, which most people should. The streets immediately around the Piazza del Duomo lead in one direction to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, a nineteenth-century glass-and-iron shopping arcade that is technically the world's oldest active shopping mall, and in the other direction toward the fashion district, where Armani, Prada, and Versace are headquartered within walking distance of each other.