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Photo: Arbalete, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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.
Piazza San Babila is a city square in Milan, 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.
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.
Small square, which however, is noted for a stunning Art Nouveau palace today called the Hotel del Corso, but once the Trianon. You reach it just off a tiny opening at the beginning of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele.
Museo Bagatti Valsecchi
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.
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).
One of the most popular high street shopping arteries in the city. It has a very elegant modern appearance, but too has some well-preserved grand 18th- and 19th-century buildings, including a rotunda-like neoclassical church. The Corso contains some great retail stores, including big shopping centres, fashionable outlets, and youthful, sporty designer boutiques. It is pedestrian.