Museo del Novecento

Fontana’s neon and the spiral ramp of the Museo del Novecento

Lucio Fontana’s neon, the loop of light in the window over Piazza del Duomo, belongs to the Museo del Novecento, and you can walk up to it. A spiral ramp takes you from the level of the metro up through the tower of the Palazzo dell’Arengario, and along the way the museum hangs more than 300 works of Italian art from the 1900s.

Novecento is Italian for the 20th century, and this is Milan’s museum of it. The 300 on show are picked from the city’s collection of more than 4,000 pieces of 20th-century Italian art, gathered by Milanese collectors.

From the Futurists to Fontana: the Museo del Novecento’s rooms

The route runs by theme and by decade, and it opens with the Futurists: Boccioni, Balla, Carrà, Russolo and Severini. Next come the 1920s to the 1940s, with de Chirico, Morandi and the sculptor Arturo Martini, and one room holds foreign artists, Picasso, Matisse and Kandinsky among them.

Then comes the Sala Fontana. Lucio Fontana’s Soffitto spaziale, a ceiling he made in 1956, was put back together here in 2010, and his Struttura al neon, the neon you saw from the square, was first made for a Triennale, the exhibition held at the Palazzo dell’Arte, today’s Triennale Milano. An intermediate floor holds more of his work from 1951 to 1962.

From there the rooms move into the 1950s and 60s, and then a section called Gesti e processi takes you from the 1960s to the 1990s. A gift from the Bertolini collection in 2015 added artists from abroad, among them Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg and Daniel Buren.

One painting you won’t find is Pellizza da Volpedo’s Il Quarto Stato, the Fourth Estate, which older guides still put here. It hung in the museum for more than a decade and went back to the GAM, Milan’s modern art gallery at Via Palestro 16, in July 2022.

Novecento tickets: two audio guides, and free Sundays and Tuesdays

Book a time slot at the Novecento for €18.50 and two guides come with it on your phone: an audio guide app for the museum, in English, Italian, French or German, and a digital audio guide to the city of Milan for when you’re back on the square. You can cancel up to 24 hours before your slot.

Under-18s go in free every day, and from 14 they can go round on their own. Two days a month are free for more people: the first Sunday for everyone, and the second Tuesday for under-25s. On the free Sundays there are no online tickets, so you get yours at the desk on the day.

The Novecento on YesMilano, alongside the Sforza Castle

Both YesMilano passes include the Novecento.

The Sforza Castle is another of the six, so with the Duomo next door the pass covers a whole day around the centre.

Late Thursdays at the Museo del Novecento, and the days it’s shut

On Thursdays the museum stays open until 22:30, with the last entry at 21:30. On other days the doors shut at 19:30, and the last entry is an hour before.

The Arengario, 250 metres from the Duomo metro

The museum opened in the Arengario in December 2010, and its spiral ramp carries on up to a terrace over the Duomo. On the top floor there’s a restaurant and bar looking over the square.

It’s at Piazza Duomo 8, about 250 metres from the Duomo stop on the M1 and M3 metro lines, so you can pair it with the Duomo itself without another ride. Trams 2, 3, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 19 also stop at Duomo, and bus 61 passes close by.