About the Duomo di Milano: The Cathedral's Story

Behind almost everything the Duomo has ever needed sits one institution: founded in 1387 to build the cathedral, and still responsible for its upkeep today. It once held sweeping privileges to make that job possible, including an exclusive, tax-free right to marble from the Candoglia quarry, carried in by river and canal along Milan's own Navigli system.

The Fabbrica still runs the Duomo's restoration, funded partly through its own shop and a spire-adoption programme that lets donors sponsor the upkeep of one of the cathedral's 135 spires.

Inside the Royal Palace on Piazza del Duomo, the Duomo Museum holds the original statues, stained glass and models that once stood on the cathedral itself, moved indoors to protect them and to let visitors see details never visible from the piazza below.

First opened in 1953, redesigned in 1974 and reopened again in 2013, its opening galleries are built around the cathedral's own Treasure, long held by the Duomo's Metropolitan Chapter. Open daily except Wednesdays.

Older than the Duomo itself, this church was built in 1336 as the private chapel of Azzone Visconti, Lord of Milan, later dedicated to Saint Gotthard, invoked against the gout Azzone himself suffered from.

Its bell tower once carried the city's first public clock, striking all 24 hours from sunset, distinctive enough that the surrounding neighbourhood is still called Contrada delle Ore, the Quarter of the Hours. Inside: Azzone's own funerary monument and a Crucifixion fresco from Giotto's school.

High above the altar, in a niche 40 metres up, the Duomo keeps what tradition holds is one of the nails from the Crucifixion, supposedly found by Helena, Constantine's mother.

Once a year, during the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross each September, Milan's Archbishop rises to retrieve it aboard the Nivola, a cloud-shaped lift built in the 17th century, once hand-cranked and now automated. The nail is displayed on the main altar for 40 hours, a ceremony held every year for five centuries.

Set into the cathedral floor since 1786, a brass meridian line once did real civic work: astronomers from Milan's Brera Observatory laid it to mark the exact moment of solar noon.

For a time, that instant triggered a signal to a cannon at Sforza Castle, so the whole city could set its clocks by the Duomo. A 1976 check found the line still accurate to within about two seconds of true solar noon.

Built in the 1930s, the Duomo's pipe organ spans five keyboards and 225 ranks of pipes, still the largest organ in Italy today, tucked into a cathedral built centuries before anyone could have designed an instrument that size.

It's played during the cathedral's daily services, filling a nave whose acoustics were shaped by six hundred years of construction rather than any single design.