Leonardo da Vinci Science and Technology Museum

Milan's science museum is the city's best rainy-day answer and its most underrated Leonardo sight. It fills a sixteenth-century Olivetan monastery, San Vittore al Corpo, a few minutes' walk from the Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio, and it opened in 1953, on the five-hundredth anniversary of Leonardo's birth. That anniversary explains the museum's most famous section: a long gallery of wooden models built from Leonardo's notebooks, from flying machines and bridges to war engines, cranes and the gear systems he sketched while working for the Sforza court. Seen after the Last Supper, they complete the picture of a man who was hired in Milan as much as an engineer as a painter, and the drawings reproduced beside each model show how far he worked from first principles. The rest of the museum is a broad, hands-on tour of Italian industry and invention. The cloisters lead to rooms on materials, energy, communication and astronomy, with telegraphs, early radios, typewriters and computers along the way. Two big industrial pavilions hold the real heavyweights: the rail pavilion, laid out like a nineteenth-century station with steam locomotives and carriages, and the air and water pavilion with aircraft, a sailing ship and the bridge of an ocean liner. Outside sits the star of the show for most children, the Enrico Toti submarine, the first submarine built in Italy after the Second World War, which was moved here by road and river in 2005 and can be visited inside on separate timed guided tours. Interactive laboratories run hands-on sessions for school-age children at weekends and in holidays. Expect a big, rambling building that rewards a plan: it is easy to spend half a day and still miss a wing.

Tickets and timing: the museum is closed on Mondays and open from mid-morning to late afternoon, with longer weekend hours. A standard entry ticket covers the permanent collections and, usually, the temporary exhibitions, and booking online through Tiqets saves time at the desk on busy weekends. The submarine tours and the interactive labs are extras with limited places, so book those slots as soon as you arrive, or ahead, and plan the rest of the visit around them. Weekday afternoons are the quietest time; weekend mornings bring school-age families and the labs fill quickly.

How to see it: start with the Leonardo gallery on the ground floor while you are fresh, then walk the cloisters and the upper floors in whatever order interests you (space and astronomy, communication and computing are the strongest for teenagers), and save the rail and air-and-water pavilions and the Toti for last, because they are the most physical and the most fun. Allow three hours for a family visit and two for a focused adult one. There is a café on site, but the streets around Sant'Ambrogio have better options for lunch, and the museum allows re-entry only at its discretion, so check before leaving.

Getting there and combining: the entrance is on Via San Vittore, a short walk from the Sant'Ambrogio stop on metro line M2 and from the Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio itself. The Last Supper at Santa Maria delle Grazie is ten minutes away on foot, which makes a natural Leonardo day: the painting in the morning, the models and machines after lunch. Families can finish with a run in Parco Sempione, a short metro or tram ride north.