Museo del Novecento
Rooms of Italian twentieth-century art climax at a rooftop restaurant-bar looking straight down onto the Duomo.
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Housed in the Palazzo dell'Arengario right off Piazza del Duomo, this 2010 museum packs roughly 400 twentieth-century works — mostly Italian — into a single building. The breadth is unusual: Futurism, Arte Povera, Abstractionism, and Realism sit alongside dedicated rooms for de Chirico, Lucio Fontana, and Morandi, plus a 2015 donation of Lichtenstein, Warhol, and Rauschenberg.
What to look for
- The Italian Futurist galleries, where Boccioni, Balla, and Carrà show up in force alongside Depero and Russolo
- The rooms dedicated to Lucio Fontana and Giorgio de Chirico — each artist gets their own section
- The top-floor restaurant-bar, which looks directly over Piazza del Duomo
The restaurant-bar on the top floor is open to museum visitors and gives one of the closer elevated views of the Duomo facade.
Museo del Novecento is one of 35 sights worth the detour in Milan, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Milan pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Milan
- San Siro — Giuseppe Meazza StadiumTwo rival clubs, one ground: the 75,817-seat arena where Milan's football fault line runs.
- Milan Cathedral (Duomo di Milano)Construction started in 1386 and the final details were finished in 1965 — the city couldn't stop adding to it.
- La ScalaThe gallery gods who booed tenor Roberto Alagna off stage mid-Aida in 2006 still haunt the loggione — the cheapest seats in opera's most feared house.
- Santa Maria delle GrazieThe wall Leonardo painted on was sand-bagged against Allied bombs in 1943 — and held.
- Sforza CastleLeonardo da Vinci painted the ceiling here. Bramante did the walls down the hall.
- Galleria Vittorio Emanuele IIThe direct ancestor of every enclosed shopping mall on earth — and there is still a worn hole in the floor where Milanese spin a heel for luck.