Places to see in Milan

Milan's major painting collection — Mantegna's foreshortened Dead Christ, Piero della Francesca, Raphael, Caravaggio — in an academy building in the most attractive quarter of the city. Consistently uncrowded for what it holds. Two hours, then the Brera streets around it.

A brick fortress at the top of the old centre holding several museums at once, among them Michelangelo's last and unfinished Pietà. The courtyards are free to walk through and Sempione park opens out behind it — the easiest place in central Milan to sit down outdoors. Half a day with the museums, twenty minutes if you are cutting through.

Six hundred years in the building and carrying more statues than any other church in the world. The interior is free and surprisingly dim; the reason to buy a ticket is the roof, where you walk among the spires and buttresses with the Alps visible on a clear day. Lifts and stairs are priced separately. Shoulders and knees must be covered.

An open-air gallery of funerary sculpture from the 1860s onward, laid out like a small city and free to walk. Unexpected, uncrowded, and one of the more memorable hours in Milan for anyone who likes sculpture or a camera. Twenty minutes north of the centre by tram.

One of the few opera houses whose name means something to people who never go to the opera. The museum and a look into a box are open by day; a performance is a different proposition and wants planning months out. The plain exterior surprises everyone who arrives expecting a monument.

Milan's oldest church, largely eleventh-century, and the model for Romanesque building across Lombardy — a colonnaded atrium, two mismatched towers, almost no decoration. Free, calm, and a complete change of register from the cathedral. Worth the twenty-minute walk out from the centre.

The Dominican convent whose refectory wall carries Leonardo's Last Supper. The painting is a separate, strictly timed visit — a quarter of an hour, a couple of dozen people, and slots that go weeks ahead, which is the single most common booking mistake on a Milan trip. The church itself is free and quiet.

A food hall behind the cathedral trading since 1883 — cheese, cured meat, pastry and a wine cellar underneath. More useful as an assembled lunch than a sit-down meal.

A glass-roofed arcade from the 1870s linking the cathedral to La Scala, and the ancestor of every shopping centre since. Free to walk through and expensive to sit down in. Two minutes in passing, longer if you want the mosaic floor and the bull that people spin a heel on for luck.