Pinacoteca Ambrosiana

The Ambrosiana is one of Milan's best-kept secrets, a short walk from the Duomo yet often peaceful. It was founded in the early seventeenth century by Cardinal Federico Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan and cousin of St Charles Borromeo, as a library, an academy for artists and a picture gallery, all in the service of learning and faith. The library, opened in 1609, was one of the first in Europe open to the public, and it remains a working research institution; the art gallery, the Pinacoteca, followed a few years later from the cardinal's own collection. The museum rooms are an atmospheric mix of grand halls and intimate cabinets, and the highlights are remarkable. Caravaggio's Basket of Fruit, perhaps the first true still life in Italian painting, shows bruised and worm-eaten fruit with startling realism. Raphael's preparatory cartoon for The School of Athens, the full-size drawing for his fresco in the Vatican, is the largest Renaissance cartoon to survive and is shown in a darkened room of its own. Leonardo's Portrait of a Musician is the only portrait on panel by him that remains in Milan. Titian, Botticelli, Bernardino Luini and Jan Brueghel the Elder are all here too. And in the Sala Federiciana, the original reading room of the library, the Ambrosiana shows rotating selections of original sheets from the Codex Atlanticus, the largest collection of Leonardo's drawings and notes, covering everything from flying machines to hydraulics and weapons.

Practicalities: the Ambrosiana is open daily except Wednesdays, with the ticket office closing about forty-five minutes before the museum. A combined ticket adds the Crypt of San Sepolcro, the atmospheric eleventh-century crypt of the church next door, at the very site of the Roman forum of Mediolanum; it is worth the small extra cost. Temporary exhibitions in the Pinacoteca change through the year, and in autumn 2026 a show on images of St Francis runs to January 2027. Tickets can be bought at the door or online, and booking through a platform such as Tiqets fixes your entry. Allow around ninety minutes, more if you want to study the Leonardo sheets.

How to see it: go first to the Raphael cartoon, while the room is quiet; its scale and the confidence of the drawing are startling, and you can make out the pinpricks used to transfer the design. Then find Caravaggio's fruit basket, displayed at eye level in a small room, and Leonardo's Musician. The Codex Atlanticus pages in the Sala Federiciana are shown under low light and change periodically, so each visit shows different drawings. The museum is also a pleasure for its own sake, with Borromeo's historic rooms and the courtyard.

Fitting it in: the Ambrosiana is five minutes' walk west of the Duomo, so it works well on a rainy afternoon or as an add-on to a cathedral morning. It also pairs naturally with the Last Supper, as a Leonardo day: see the painting in the morning, then the drawings here in the afternoon. The nearby streets around Via Torino and the Cinque Vie district are full of small churches and old lanes, including Santa Maria presso San Satiro, with Bramante's famous illusionistic choir. Families with children interested in inventions can follow the Ambrosiana's Leonardo sheets with a visit to the National Museum of Science and Technology, which builds working models from his designs, a short metro ride west.