Sforza Castle

Sforza Castle tickets: open courtyards, ticketed museums

You can walk into Milan’s Sforza Castle without a ticket: its courtyards are open every day from 7:00 to 19:30. The ticket is for the museums inside, and one ticket opens all of them for the day.

The ticket we sell, at €20, is a reserved entry with a digital audio guide to the castle on your phone, plus a second audio guide for the city of Milan. Bring your own headphones. You don’t have to book the museums, but this ticket reserves your entry, and you can cancel up to 24 hours before your time.

Under-18s go into the museums free, so the €8 on a child’s ticket is for the audio guide app. On the first Sunday of every month the museums are free for everyone, and on the second Tuesday for under-25s.

If you’d rather be shown round, the guided tour at €49.90 takes 90 minutes through the castle museums and the Pietà Rondanini with a live guide in English and entry included. The cancellation rule is the same.

Is the Sforza Castle on the YesMilano City Pass?

Yes. The Sforza Castle museums are among the six civic museums that both YesMilano City Passes include, so on the Standard they leave your one premium choice free for somewhere else. As with everything on the pass, you book the day and time in the app.

For the other passes and what each one covers, see Milan Pass and Milan’s city passes.

Michelangelo’s Pietà Rondanini at the Sforza Castle

Michelangelo carved the Pietà Rondanini, the Virgin holding the dead Christ, over the last ten years of his life, and he died in 1564 with it unfinished. Since 2015 it has stood in the castle’s former Spanish Hospital, the Ospedale Spagnolo, where you can walk all the way round it, under a vault painted with lines from the Creed.

Inside the Sforza Castle museums: the armoury, Mantegna and the Egyptian gallery

The Museo d’Arte Antica holds about 400 works from the 5th to the 16th century, and the armoury is in room XIV. In the Pinacoteca, the castle’s picture gallery, Andrea Mantegna’s altarpiece of 1497 hangs in room XXIII.

The castle’s own list of things not to miss also names the tomb of Bernabò Visconti, of the family that built the castle, in gilded marble from around 1360 to 1385. It adds the Stipo Passalacqua, a cabinet from 1613, and the Trivulzio tapestries designed by Bramantino. The last name on it is the Studio di Fonologia Musicale, the sound studio that RAI, Italy’s state broadcaster, ran from 1955 to 1983.

The Egyptian gallery has been renovated, and it shows mummies, sarcophagi, a statue of the pharaoh Amenemhat III and the finds from the excavations led by Vogliano in the Faiyum, in Egypt, in the 1930s.

The decorative arts museum is open as well, while the prehistory section of the archaeological museum is closed for now. With only an hour to spare, walk the courtyards and go straight to the Pietà.

Leonardo at the Sforza Castle: the Sala delle Asse, still closed

The Last Supper isn’t here. The castle’s Leonardo is the Sala delle Asse, a room in the Torre Falconiera where he painted a pergola of 18 trees, rediscovered in 1893–94 and changed by later work in 1901–02 and 1955–56. It’s closed for restoration, and the city has said it should reopen in April 2027.

When the Sforza Castle museums open, and the battlements walk

The museums close on Mondays, and the last entry is an hour before they close.

Up on the walls, the Merlate Panoramiche, the walk along the battlements, isn’t part of the museum ticket and costs €10 on its own. From Tuesday to Sunday groups of 25 go up by lift every 20 minutes, with the last entry at 17:00, and the lift also takes wheelchairs and pushchairs.

The Sforza Castle’s story, from the Visconti to Luca Beltrami

Galeazzo II Visconti built the castle as a fortress between 1360 and 1370, and it became the dukes’ residence. When Milan declared itself the Ambrosian Republic, from 1447 to 1450, the castle was partly torn down, and Francesco Sforza rebuilt it. Under Galeazzo Maria Sforza and Ludovico il Moro its court drew Leonardo and the architect Bramante.

From 1535 it was a barracks for foreign rulers: the Spanish until 1706, then the Austrians, the French and the Austrians again until 1859. At the end of the 19th century the architect Luca Beltrami restored it and turned it into a museum.

Reaching the Sforza Castle on Piazza Castello

The castle is on Piazza Castello, and three metro stations serve it: Cairoli on the M1, Lanza on the M2 and Cadorna on both lines. Trams 1, 2, 4, 12 and 14 and buses 50, 57, 58 and 85 stop close by.

Dogs can come into the courtyards but not into the museums, unless they’re guide dogs.