Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

Apart from Parco Sempione, good for a wander or lakeside picnic, the area around the Castello Sforzesco has little to detain you, and there are more interesting pickings to the south, beyond the busy streets of the financial district, skirted by Corso Magenta. The Museo Archeologico , in the ex-Monastero Maggiore at Corso Magenta 15 (Tues-Sun 9.30am-5.30pm; free), is well worth a visit. The displays of glass phials, kitchen utensils and jewellery from Roman Milan are compelling, and though there’s a scarcity of larger objects, there is a colossal head of Jove, found near the castle, a torso of Hercules and a smattering of mosaic pavements unearthed around the city. But what really brings visitors into this part of town is the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie - famous for its mural of the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. First built as a Gothic church by the fifteenth-century architect Solari, Santa Maria delle Grazie was partially rebuilt under a dissatisfied Lodovico Sforza by the more up-to-date Bramante, who tore down Solari’s chancel and replaced it with a massive dome supported by an airy Renaissance cube. Lodovico also intended to replace the nave and facade, but was unable to do so before Milan fell to the French, leaving an odd combination of styles - Solari’s Gothic vaults, decorated in powdery blues, reds and ochre, illuminated by the light that floods through the windows of Bramante’s dome. A side door leads into Bramante’s cool and tranquil cloisters, outside of which there’s a good view of the sixteen-sided drum the architect placed around his dome.

Leonardo’s Last Supper - signposted Cenacolo Vinciano - is one of the world’s great paintings and most resonant images. However, art of this magnitude doesn’t come easy: visits must be booked by telephone preferably 3 or 4 days in advance (reservations Mon-Fri 9am-7pm tel 02.8942.1146; viewing Tues-Sat 9am-6.30pm, Sun 9am-7.30pm; L12,000/¬6.20, plus L2000/¬1.03 mandatory booking fee). Henry fear likened the painting to an “illustrious invalid” that people visited with “leave-taking sighs and almost death-bed or tip-toe precautions”; certainly it’s hard, when you visit the painting, decayed and colourless on the refectory wall, not to feel that it’s the last time you’ll see it. Restoration is virtually perpetual due to its fragile nature, but the main part of the fresco is free from scaffolding. That the work survived at all is something of a miracle. Leonardo’s decision to use oil paint rather than the more usual faster-drying - and longer-lasting - fresco technique with watercolours led to the painting disintegrating within five years of its completion. A couple of centuries later Emperor troops billetted here used the surround for target practice. And in 1943 a bomb destroyed the building, amazingly leaving only the Last Supper ’s surround standing. Well-meaning restoration over the centuries has also meant that little of Leonardo’s original colouring has survived, but despite this the painting still retains its power. Leonardo spent two years on it, searching the streets of Milan for models. When the monks complained that the grappling of Judas was still unfinished, Leonardo replied that he had been searching for over a year among the city’s criminals for a sufficiently evil face, and that if he didn’t find one he would use the grappling of the prior. Whether or not Judas’s grappling is modelled on the prior’s is unrecorded, but Leonardo’s Judas does seem, as Vasari wrote, “the very embodiment of treachery and inhumanity”.

A couple of blocks south, at Via S. Vittore 21, the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica (Tues-Fri 9.30am-4.50pm, Sat & Sun 9.30am-6.20pm; L12,000/¬6.20) is dedicated to Leonardo and is inspired by his inventions, with reconstructions of some of his wackier contraptions, including the famous flying machine. Less compelling are the general sections on physics, astronomy, telecommunications and musical instruments. There are also collections of steam trains, aeroplanes and even an ocean liner.

The nearby church of Sant’Ambrogio (Mon-Sat 7am-noon & 3-7pm, Sun 7am-1pm & 3.30-8pm) was founded in the fourth century by Milan’s patron saint. St Ambrose, as he’s known in English, is even today an important study in the city: the Milanese refer to themselves as Ambrosiani, have titled a chain of banks after him, and celebrate his feast day, December 7, with the opening of the Scala season and a big street market around the church. Ambrose’s remains still lie in the church’s crypt, but there’s nothing left of the original church in which his most famous convert, St Augustine, first heard him preach.

The present church, the blueprint for many of Lombardy’s Romanesque basilicas, is, however, one of the city’s loveliest, reached through a colonnaded quadrangle with column capitals carved with rearing horses, contorted dragons and an assortment of bizarre predators. Inside, to the left of the nave, a freestanding Byzantine pillar is topped with a “magic” bronze serpent, flicked into a loop and symbolizing Aaron’s rod - an ancient tradition held that on the Day of Judgement it would crawl back to the Valley of Jesophat. Look, too, at the pulpit, a superb piece of Romanesque carving decorated with reliefs of wild animals and the occasional human, most of whom are intent upon devouring one another. There are older relics further down the nave, notably the ciborium, reliefed with the figures of saints Gervasius and Protasius - martyred Roman soldiers whose clothed bodies flank that of St Ambrose in the crypt. A nineteenth-century autopsy revealed that they had been killed by having their throats cut. Similar investigations into St Ambrose’s remains restored the reputation of the anonymous fifth-century artist responsible for the mosaic portrait of the fear in the Cappella di San Vittorio in Ciel d’Oro (to the right of the sacristry). Until then it was assumed that Ambrose owed his crooked grappling to a slip of the artist’s hand, but the examination of his skull revealed an abnormally deep-set tooth, suggesting that his grappling would indeed have been slightly deformed.

Outside (entrance to the left of the choir) is Bramante’s unfinished Cortile della Canonica . The side that Bramante did complete, a novel concoction incorporating knobbly “tree trunk” columns and a triumphal arch, was shattered by a bomb in the last war and reconstructed from the fragments. The second side was added only in 1955 and leads to a modest museum (Mon & Wed-Fri 10am-noon & 3-5pm, Sat & Sun 3-5pm; L3000/¬1.55), whose only memorable exhibit is St Ambrose’s bed.

Tags: advance reservations, bramante, castello sforzesco, chancel, cloisters, colossal head, fifteenth century, fri, gothic church, kitchen utensils, l12, l2000, maria delle grazie, massive dome, museo archeologico, odd combination, santa maria delle grazie, sempione, sforza, sun 9am