Milan
Italy's financial and fashion capital
Milan is Italy's engine room dressed in couture. Where Rome trades on antiquity, Milan trades on the present — its stock exchange, its fashion houses, its design fairs, its football. At the city's heart, the white marble pinnacles of the Duomo bristle against the sky, and beside it the glass-roofed Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II shelters the world's most famous shopping arcade. Behind the elegance is a working metropolis of more than six million people across its wider area, the wealthiest and most international city in the country.
Milan lies on the flat, fertile Po Valley of Lombardy in northern Italy, with the Alps visible to the north on clear days and the city standing at around 120 metres above sea level. It has no major river but a historic network of canals, the Navigli, once used to transport the marble for the cathedral. The Po Valley climate brings hot, humid summers, cold, foggy winters, and the famous winter haze that settles over the plain.
Founded by a Celtic tribe around 590 BCE and taken by Rome as Mediolanum, Milan was briefly capital of the Western Roman Empire and the place where Constantine's edict legalized Christianity. Through the Renaissance it flourished under the Visconti and Sforza dukes, who summoned Leonardo da Vinci to paint The Last Supper here. Today Milan is Italy's financial center and a global capital of fashion and design, host of its twice-yearly fashion weeks and the Salone del Mobile.