One day in Milan

One day in Milan: the Duomo in the morning, Leonardo in the afternoon

Milan’s centre fits into a morning on foot. You start on the roof of the Duomo, cross the square to the Museo del Novecento, then walk through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II to La Scala. After lunch the M1 takes you a few stops west to the Sforza Castle, for Michelangelo’s last Pietà, and on to Leonardo’s Last Supper, a little further along the same line at Conciliazione.

The Pinacoteca di Brera, for Mantegna, Raphael and Hayez’s The Kiss, and the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, where Leonardo’s own Portrait of a Musician hangs, need a second day, and so does the science museum, with its models of Leonardo’s machines and a submarine in the grounds.

Check the plan against your date first.

What to book before your day in Milan

Book the Last Supper before anything else.

Morning: the Duomo’s roof, the Novecento, the Galleria and La Scala

Come with a small bag and covered shoulders and knees. The Duomo has a security check at the door and no cloakroom, and nobody gets in wearing a sleeveless top, shorts, a miniskirt or a hat, though the Duomo sells disposable capes for €3.

Go up first. It’s 251 steps to the terraces, or a lift to the first level, and then a marble walkway between the spires, with the Madonnina, the gilded Virgin, on the tallest, 108.5 metres up. There are no toilets on the roof, and everyone walks down.

Then into the cathedral, for two things: the sculptor Marco d’Agrate’s St Bartholomew Flayed, the apostle stripped of his skin, and the red light high over the choir, which marks where the Holy Nail is kept. Our ticket for the cathedral with the terraces costs €27, and the YesMilano Standard includes both, with the terraces by the stairs.

Across the square, in the Palazzo dell’Arengario, the Museo del Novecento shows 20th-century Italian art up a spiral ramp. It starts with the Futurists, Boccioni and Balla, climbs to de Chirico and Morandi, and reaches the room with the artist Lucio Fontana’s neon, the loop of light you saw in the window from the square.

The ramp carries on up to a terrace over the Duomo, and the top floor has a restaurant and bar looking over the square, if you want an early lunch with a view. Our Novecento ticket costs €18.50 and comes with an audio guide app, and it’s one of the civic museums on the YesMilano passes.

Back on the square, the arch leads into the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, the glass-roofed arcade opened in 1867 by the king it’s named after. Walking through costs nothing. Before you go on, look down for Turin’s bull in the floor mosaic: turning three times on your right heel on it is meant to bring you luck, which is why the mosaic keeps wearing through. The Highline walkway on its roof and Leonardo3, the museum of Leonardo’s machines at the La Scala end, are both in this building if you’d rather spend your YesMilano premium pick here.

Out at the far end you’re facing La Scala. The museum, whose entrance is at Largo Ghiringhelli 1 beside the theatre’s square, fills its rooms with costumes, scores and historic instruments, and on days without a rehearsal it lets you step into a box and look down on the auditorium.

On the YesMilano passes the museum counts as a premium activity, so on the Standard it uses your one pick. Without a pass, our guided tour at €39 takes you into the theatre itself and the museum, from Monday to Saturday on days without rehearsals.

Afternoon: the Sforza Castle and Leonardo’s Last Supper

After lunch, the M1 takes you from Duomo to Cairoli and the Sforza Castle, the fortress built by the Visconti and rebuilt by the Sforza, the two families that ruled Milan from the 1300s to the 1500s. The courtyards are free to walk into; the ticket is for the museums, and if you’re short of time, go straight to the Pietà Rondanini.

Michelangelo carved it, the Virgin holding the dead Christ, over the last ten years of his life, and it was still unfinished at his death in 1564. It stands in the castle’s old Spanish Hospital, under a vault painted with lines from the Creed. With more time, the picture gallery has Mantegna’s altarpiece of 1497, and there’s an armoury and an Egyptian gallery. Our castle ticket costs €20 with an audio guide app, and both YesMilano passes include the museums.

From the castle, the M1 runs on to Conciliazione, a short walk from Santa Maria delle Grazie, and tram 16 stops outside. Leonardo painted the Last Supper on the end wall of the friars’ refectory between about 1495 and 1498, the moment Jesus tells the twelve that one of them will betray him.

You go in with a group of up to 40, through automatic doors that filter the air, for 15 minutes in the room. Judas is the one in shadow, holding the purse, and the irregular arch in the lower centre is a doorway cut through the wall in 1652. Before your time is up, turn round: a Crucifixion by Montorfano, a Lombard painter of Leonardo’s day, covers the opposite wall. Bring photo ID, since every ticket carries a name, and leave big bags in the free lockers.

No pass includes the Last Supper. Our guided tour, from €95, gives you a skip-the-line entry at a set time, a live guide and a headset, about an hour in all, and it can’t be cancelled. If you’d rather hand the whole day to a guide, another tour does the Duomo, the Last Supper and La Scala’s theatre and museum in three and a half hours, with a coach between them, though without the Duomo’s terraces.

If the Last Supper is sold out: Leonardo at the Ambrosiana or Leonardo3

When there’s no slot on your day, two places near the Duomo show you Leonardo another way. The Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, by Cordusio, has his Portrait of a Musician, and its 17th-century reading room shows original sheets of his Codex Atlanticus, a few at a time, with the Roman paving of the Crypt of San Sepolcro on the same ticket. Give it about two hours, and not on a Wednesday, when it’s shut.

Leonardo3, inside the Galleria, is the museum of Leonardo’s machines, many of them there to be handled, and it rebuilds the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie as it looked in his day, with the Last Supper in it. It’s open every day until 20:00 from October to March, so it also fits at the end of the afternoon, back in the centre after the castle. Both are YesMilano premium activities, so on the Standard either one takes the place of La Scala’s museum.

YesMilano pass or single tickets for one day in Milan

The YesMilano Standard costs €60 and covers this whole day except the Last Supper: the Duomo with its terraces by the stairs, the Novecento and the castle as civic museums, La Scala’s museum as your one premium pick, and the metro from the centre to the castle. On our tickets, the Duomo with its terraces at €27, the castle at €20 and the Novecento at €18.50 come to a little more than the pass, before La Scala’s museum and the metro. For a single day that’s a small margin, and the pass can’t be refunded once you’ve booked anything, while our castle and Novecento tickets can be cancelled up to 24 hours before.

The pass runs for three calendar days from the day you activate it, so on a longer stay the next two carry on with the metro and the other civic museums, from the Aquarium to the Natural History Museum. With children the sums shrink: under-18s go into the castle and the Novecento free, and the pass has no child price.

The rest of the city is on things to do in Milan, and how each pass adds up for a longer list on Milan Pass and Milan’s city passes.