Milan Art Tour: Top Attractions, Accommodation And Dining Tips

While Milan is well known as a global fashion and design hub, it’s also one of the most exciting art cities in the world and art could easily keep any visitor fully occupied for days. Here are some of the best art museums to visit, highlights in each, along with suggestions of where to stay and eat.

Modern Art

For starters, if you stay at the sumptious Hotel Principe di Savoia, you can enjoy one of the best art tours in the city. Fontana – Slashing Space walking tour has been exclusively created for guests of the hotel, part of the Dorchester Collection which offers special art tours in its other hotels too. At Le Meurice in Paris, guests can choose from art tours on Picasso, Rodin or Monet while 45 Park Lane features British sculptor Barbara Hepworth. The focus of the art tour in Milan is Lucio Fontana, one of Italy’s most revolutionary modern artists, known best for his slashed canvases. Art historian Olimpia Isidori has created a fascinating tour tracing Fontana’s story from his move to Milan as a child from Argentina, his studies at Brera Academy and his ultimate rejection of his prestigious Art Academy education to forge his own path. The tour includes a stop at a cafe frequented by Fontana, the art supply shop where he got his materials and a walk through the Brera Academy, where he studied in the late 1920s under the symbolist sculptor Adolfo Wildt. Fontana was the first known artist to slash his canvases – which he said symbolised an utter rejection of all art theory.

Continuing with modern art, Fondazione Prada is one of the most beautiful museums in Milan (designed by Rem Koolhaus). The current exhibition features Pino Pascali (on until 23 September 2024), an artist who is not so well known outside of Italy. It is a stupendous retrospective by an artist who had a very short career (he died tragically in 1968 in a motorcycle accident at the age of 32). Considered to be part of the Italian Arte Povera (Italian: literally “poor art”) movement that took place between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, Pascali was hugely influential, and this retrospective demonstrates why. Curated by Mark Godfrey, the show includes 49 works drawn from Italian and international museums, and private collections. Taking place over three buildings in the museum, this is a must see.

Pirelli HangarBicocca, which used to be a Pirelli tire factory, was converted into 10,900 square metres of exhibition galleries in 2012. Currently on show is Nari Ward, the Jamaican born American artist, who has recreated his installation Super Stud which he first made in 1994. Running until 28 July 2024, it is an enormous installation (in an enormous hangar), and features vast, colorful stringed nets suspended overhead, walls of discarded wooden pallets, bits and pieces of buildings, broken pianos, and curtains made of bottles and Budweiser cans. It is a cacophonous work using raw, found and ready-made material, that reminds us of the Arte Povera ideas you can see in Pino Pascali’s work.

One of the big draws at HangarBicocca is a permanent installation by the German artist Anselm Kiefer: a gasp out loud kind of work. It was created as a temporary work for the opening of the museum in 2004 but was so beloved by the Milanese that they decided to make it permanent. It consists of seven towers - each weighing 90 tons and rising to heights of between 13 and 19 meters, created from reinforced concrete using shipping containers. The towers symbolise the mystical experience of the ascent through the seven levels of spirituality in the ancient Hebrew Book of Palaces/ Sanctuaries, which dates back to the 4th-5th centuries A.D. Art can sometimes be overwhelming and sometimes, it is supposed to overwhelm. Art can also make one feel small, and again, it is sometimes meant to. Kiefer’s work at HangarBicocca does both those things, with a truly monumental work that is of Biblical proportions.

Classical Art

The Brera museum is the largest classical art museum in Milan, whose highlights include The Lamentation of Christ (1480) by Andrea Mantegna, with its famously extreme foreshortening, and a sublime Raphael, Marriage of the Virgin (1504), which places the architectural perspective (a new Renaissance trick) to the forefront leaving poor Mary and Joseph as just bit-players. There is also Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus (1605-6), a masterful demonstration of chiaroscuro and flailing hands, a later copy (by Caravaggio) of the one in London’s National Gallery.

And speaking of Caravaggio, the bad boy of the art world can be found in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, a less visited museum than the Brera but with just as many iconic works, we find his Basket of Fruit (1599), considered one of the first examples of still life in European painting. The hyper-realistic basket seems to teeter on the edge of the picture-space, in danger of falling out of the painting and into the viewer's space instead.

The other great masterpiece here is the largest Renaissance cartoon that has survived to this day and was made by Raphael as a preparatory work for his work The School of Athens (1509-11) in the Vatican.

Finally, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana (your ticket gets you into both) houses the most extensive collection of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, the Codex Atlanticus. A rare chance to see his notebooks close-up on display. And don’t miss Leonardo’s rather lovely portrait of a musician (c. 1483–1487) tucked away in the basement!

The Last Supper

One can’t do an art visit to Milan without seeing one of the most famous paintings in the world, da Vinci’s masterpiece, The Last Supper, the scene of The Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples. On the wall of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the mural was commissioned as part of a scheme of renovations to the church and its convent buildings by da Vinci's patron Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. Although you can try to book tickets on the museum’s website, they are sold out months in advance. A better option is to book a tour with one of the numerous guides, thus securing access. A good choice is the tour company, Get Your Guide, who offer a Milan Guided Walking Tour plus Last Supper Visit.

Where to Stay

The chic five star Principe di Savoia, part of the Dorchester Collection, offers a quiet location near the Porta Nuova district, with a free car service to the historic center and the ultimate luxury stay in Milan. Open since 1927, this is one of Milan’s grand historic hotels. The common areas include attractive Art Deco features that will take you back in time while the guest rooms feature an appealing blend of 19th-century décor with contemporary touches including heavy Italian drapes, lavish wallpaper and beautiful ceramic tiling in bathrooms. The spa on the top floor offers gorgeous views across the city and the lavish breakfast is one of the city’s finest.

For smaller budgets, the four star NH Milano City Life is a large business friendly hotel with spacious, airy rooms, a substantial breakfast buffet and a rooftop pool beside a metro. Or, within easy walking distance of the city center’s main attractions, Sonder Missori is a chic choice, with 40 nicely appointed modern rooms.

Where to Eat and Drink

At Principe Savoia, Acanto Restaurant offers a modern Italian menu in an elegant setting. Delicious handmade pasta dishes and highly creative desserts make for a satisfying dining experience.

If you’re looking for a hip venue for cocktails and tapas, the sprawling Moebius in a former textile workshop near Central station, has an industrial chic vibe. It houses a vinyl store as well as two restaurants Sperimentale and Tapa Bistrot, plus live entertainment.

Since 1911, and still in the same family, Jamaica, a bar and cafe near the Brera Museum, has been a favorite watering hole for creatives over the years, including Lucio Fontana, Ernest Hemingway and Allen Ginsberg.