Milan

Milan is the capital of Lombardy, a city on the Po plain in northern Italy between the Ticino and Adda rivers. Its name comes from the Latin Mediolanum, often read as the place in the middle of the plain, and the city lends its name to the Ambrosian rite, the liturgy of its archdiocese named after Saint Ambrose.

The Insubres, a Celtic people, founded the town around the 6th century BC, and it passed to Rome in the late 3rd century BC. In 313 the emperors Constantine and Licinius agreed here on the Edict of Milan, which granted tolerance to Christians. In the Middle Ages it became a commune and later a duchy under the Visconti and then the Sforza families, and Ludovico Sforza brought Leonardo da Vinci to his court. Spain and then Austria ruled the duchy, and Napoleon made the city the capital of his Kingdom of Italy in 1805. Milan joined the new Kingdom of Italy in the middle of the 19th century and grew into its center of industry and banking.

Pirelli, founded in Milan, makes car and motorcycle tires and supplies the tires for Formula One. Prada began as a leather goods shop in the city, and Giorgio Armani founded his fashion house there, making Milan Fashion Week a fixed date for Italian ready-to-wear. RCS MediaGroup publishes the Corriere della Sera newspaper.

The Duomo, begun at the end of the 14th century and finished only in the 19th, is faced with pink-tinged Candoglia marble and topped by a gilded statue of the Madonnina. Leonardo painted The Last Supper on a wall of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in the 1490s. AC Milan and Inter Milan, both founded in the city, have each won the European Cup several times. La Scala, opened in the 18th century, saw the premieres of operas by Verdi and Puccini, among them Otello and Madama Butterfly.