The Most Beautiful Places in Milan
9 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Milan are Milan Cathedral, La Scala and Monumental Cemetery of Milan. The list covers 9 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Milan has always been Italy's working capital rather than its postcard. Roman Mediolanum, the seat of the Visconti and Sforza dukes, and later the centre of Italian industry, banking and fashion, it spent its wealth on buildings meant to impress: a cathedral that took centuries, an opera house that set the standard for Europe, a railway station on an imperial scale. The result is a city where Gothic pinnacles, 19th-century iron and glass and 21st-century towers sit within a short walk of each other.
The centre is anchored by Milan Cathedral, begun in 1386 and finished only in the 20th century, its white Candoglia marble bristling with spires and statues; visitors can walk across its roof among them. Beside it, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II covers a crossroads of shops with a glass vault and dome, and a short walk away La Scala, opened in 1778, remains the most famous opera house in Italy.
The rest of the city rewards a closer look. In the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Leonardo's Last Supper still holds its wall, while the church of San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore is covered floor to vault with Renaissance frescoes. The Monumental Cemetery is an open-air gallery of sculpted tombs, Milano Centrale greets trains under vast steel sheds and a stone hall, and the Bosco Verticale grows trees on the balconies of two towers. On the Adda north-east of the city, the Taccani power station stands as a palace of industry beside a castle ruin.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Milan Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 2 | La Scala | Opera house | |
| 3 | Monumental Cemetery of Milan | Cemetery | |
| 4 | Milano Centrale | Railway station | |
| 5 | Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II | Covered passageway | |
| 6 | The Last Supper | Museum | |
| 7 | Bosco Verticale | Skyscraper | |
| 8 | San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore | Church building | |
| 9 | Taccani Hydroelectric Power Station | Hydroelectric power station |
01 Milan Cathedral
Duomo di Milano
Italy · 1.3 km from Milan45.464° N 9.191° E
Jakub Hałun · CC BY-SA 4.0 Milan Cathedral took almost six centuries to finish. Work began in 1386 under Archbishop Antonio da Saluzzo, at a moment when his cousin Gian Galeazzo Visconti had just taken power in the city; the last bronze portal was inaugurated only on 6 January 1965.
Did you know? A meridian line laid in the floor in 1786 by Brera Observatory astronomers uses a hole 24 metres up to fix solar noon to within seconds.
02 La Scala
Teatro alla Scala
Italy · 1.2 km from Milan45.468° N 9.189° E
Image by dimitrisvetsikas1969 from Pixabay La Scala in Milan is, for many, simply the opera house — the place where a singer's career is made or broken.
Did you know? Puccini's Turandot, left unfinished at the composer's death, received its first performance at La Scala in 1926.
03 Monumental Cemetery of Milan
Cimitero monumentale di Milano
Italy · 2.4 km from Milan45.486° N 9.179° E
Paolobon140 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Milan's Cimitero Monumentale is less a graveyard than an open-air museum of sculpture, a city of marble temples, obelisks, chapels and statuary in which the families of industrial and bourgeois Milan competed to commission the most striking memorial.
Did you know? The pianist Vladimir Horowitz and the Nobel Prize-winning poet Salvatore Quasimodo are both buried here.
04 Milano Centrale
Stazione di Milano Centrale
Italy · 1.5 km from Milan45.486° N 9.204° E
Ludvig14 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Milano Centrale is less a railway station than a monument to arrival. Its main front, facing Piazza Duca d'Aosta, stretches about 200 metres wide and some 50 metres high, a massive stone wall of arches, columns, reliefs and sculpture that reads more like a palace or a temple than a place to catch a train.
Did you know? Stacchini designed a private Royal Pavilion for the king and his court, with a hidden escape route: a spiral stair concealed behind a bathroom mirror.
05 Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II
Italy · 1.2 km from Milan45.466° N 9.190° E
Image by dimitrisvetsikas1969 from Pixabay The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II is Milan's great glass-roofed arcade, a cross of two covered streets joining the Piazza del Duomo to the Piazza della Scala, with an octagon and a dome where the arms meet.
Did you know? Part of the money for the project was to come from a public lottery authorised by royal decree.
06 The Last Supper
Ultima Cena
Italy · 2.6 km from Milan45.467° N 9.171° E
Leonardo da Vinci · Public domain On the end wall of a former monastic dining hall in Milan, Leonardo da Vinci painted the moment just after Christ tells his twelve apostles that one of them will betray him.
Did you know? A painter named Giuseppe Mazza repainted almost the entire work in 1770, finishing all but three faces before public outrage stopped him.
07 Bosco Verticale
Italy · 1.8 km from Milan45.486° N 9.190° E
Kokky92 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Bosco Verticale — the "vertical forest" — is two residential towers in Milan's Porta Nuova district that carry a woodland on their balconies.
Did you know? Each tree grows in a concrete basin about 1.1 metres square, with large trees anchored by welded steel frames.
08 San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore
Chiesa di San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore
Italy · 2 km from Milan45.466° N 9.179° E
MarkusMark · CC BY-SA 3.0 Behind a sober grey-stone front on Corso Magenta hides one of the most completely painted interiors of the Italian Renaissance. Almost every surface of San Maurizio — walls, chapels, lunettes, vaults — is covered with sixteenth-century frescoes, and Milanese writers have long called it the city's own "Sistine Chapel".
Did you know? Four daughters of the patrons Alessandro Bentivoglio and Ippolita Sforza entered the convent, and one of them, Alessandra, served as abbess six times.
09 Taccani Hydroelectric Power Station
Centrale idroelettrica Taccani
Italy · 15.1 km from Bergamo45.613° N 9.521° E
Antonella Cappo · CC BY-SA 4.0 Few power stations were built to look as though they had always belonged to their river. The Taccani hydroelectric plant sits at the foot of the rocky promontory where the Adda makes a sharp bend at Trezzo, directly beneath the ruins of the castle that Bernabò Visconti raised here around 1370.
Did you know? Locals often call it the Centrale Moretti, after its architect, rather than by the engineer's name it officially bears.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Milan?
- On our list, Milan Cathedral ranks first, followed by La Scala and Monumental Cemetery of Milan.
- How long did it take to build Milan Cathedral?
- Work began in 1386, and the cathedral was not considered complete until the last details were finished in 1965, nearly six centuries later. The facade itself was completed in the early 19th century at Napoleon's order.
- Where is Leonardo's Last Supper?
- The Last Supper is painted on a wall of the refectory of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. Leonardo worked on it in the 1490s using an experimental technique on dry plaster, which is why it began to deteriorate early.
- What is the Bosco Verticale?
- The Bosco Verticale, or Vertical Forest, is a pair of residential towers designed by Stefano Boeri and completed in 2014. Their balconies are planted with hundreds of trees and thousands of shrubs and plants.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Milan?
- In our collection, the places in Milan are most often churches (2), cathedrals (1), cemeteries (1) and hydroelectric power stations (1).
- How many places are on this list in Milan?
- The list covers 9 places.