The Heart of Milan: Duomo, Galleria and Sforza Castle

We start in Piazza del Duomo, in front of a building site that lasted almost six hundred years — long enough that Milanese people still use it as a figure of speech for anything that never gets finished. I'll explain why the cathedral is built from pink Candoglia marble, what a gilded Madonnina is doing 108 metres above the city, and how to read the façade.

Then we step into the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Europe's first covered shopping arcade and still known as Milan's drawing room. You'll hear the story of the architect who never saw his masterpiece opened, the meaning of the mosaics representing the four cities of the young Italian kingdom, and the ritual of the bull.

We continue along Via Orefici, where goldsmiths worked for centuries and where the ancient Roman decumanus still runs beneath our feet. From there to Piazza Cordusio. We finish in Piazza Castello, facing the Castello Sforzesco: a Visconti fortress, an Sforza palace, a barracks for foreign occupiers, and finally the city's own museum. I'll tell you about Leonardo da Vinci and Bramante at the court of Ludovico il Moro, about the Filarete Tower, and about how this square became the place where Milan gathers.