Palazzo Brera
One grand courtyard holds an art gallery, a botanical garden, an observatory, and a library — all inside a former Jesuit college that once had 3,000 students.
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Francesco Maria Richini began the present building around 1615; construction was interrupted by the 1630 plague and only resumed in 1651. After Napoleon suppressed the convents, the old church nave was literally sliced in two: the upper half became the gallery's Napoleonic rooms, the lower floor a museum of antiquities. Habsburg rulers and French emperors each left their mark on a building that started as a 12th-century monastery.
What to look for
- The inner courtyard, finished by Giuseppe Piermarini in 1780 — the architectural hinge that now connects six separate institutions
- The Orto Botanico di Brera, a botanical garden growing inside the palace complex
- The Napoleonic rooms of the Pinacoteca, occupying the upper half of the former church nave after its horizontal division post-1806
Enter from via Brera through the imposing gateway Piermarini added in 1780; the Pinacoteca and the Orto Botanico are separate institutions within the complex with their own admission arrangements.
Palazzo Brera 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.