
Photo: Giovanni Dall'Orto, Attribution via Wikimedia Commons
Extraordinary, somewhat bizarre 1880s house museum of the aristocratic Bagatti Valsecchi brothers, showcasing their passion for Renaissance art and design. Slightly spoiled by unsympathetic electrical wiring and noise-generating machines.
The Bagatti Valsecchi Museum is a historic house museum in the Montenapoleone district of downtown Milan, northern Italy.
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The city's top high fashion shopping street. It contains many of the biggest names in fashion, and some of the trendiest and famous emporia and designer stores in the world. Today, despite containing mainly fashion boutiques, there are also some jewellery shops and cafes scattered here and there.
Impressive refined-air street lined with aristocratic apartment blocks and opulent churches. It also hosts the Poldi Pezzoldi museum. Today, it is also one of the city's premier shopping streets, and is noted for containing the Armani Megastore. It is very close to La Scala opera house.
Lovely and classy little cobblestone street, with some beautiful ancient buildings. The street and its neighbourhood are more famous for the center of high-class shopping, where almost every luxury brand can be found.
Museo Poldi Pezzoli
A varied collection of art from the 14th to 19th century, including armour, clocks, porcelain and tapestries. It has been a museum since 1881. The house was bombed in 1943, resulting in a somewhat incoherent restoration, but the collection had been moved to safety.
A small, yet very impressive square, which hosts the magnificent neoclassical Belgiojoso Palace, built by Milanese noblemen in the late 1700s, and the House of Manzoni, where notable Italian writer and literary figure Alessandro Manzoni lived, and which today hosts a library and the Centro Nazionale di Studi Manzoniani (National Centre of Manzoni-related studies).
Busy and modern square just north of the cathedral and near the city's fashion district. Architecturally, Piazza San Babila's buildings are virtually all Art-Deco office blocks from the 1930s, but it has a trendy business and cosmopolitan feel to it, and despite being very modern, boasts a very old sight, San Babila, a tiny, pretty, Romanesque church standing shadowed away by the huge modern skyscrapers. Piazza San Babila also contains numerous banks, post offices, fast-food restaurants and today also a touch of some funky designer stores too. Convenience wise, it's a great place to go, because it connects the Montenapoleone shopping area, with the more central Duomo zone.