Castello Sforzesco

Sforza Castle is the great brick fortress guarding the north-west corner of Milan's centre, rebuilt by Francesco Sforza from 1450 and now home to the city's civic museums. Its courtyards form a passage between the city and Parco Sempione, its halls hold everything from Michelangelo's last sculpture to Leonardo's painted ceiling, and its fountain is the city's favourite meeting point.

Why it matters

The castle condenses Milan's political history into one plan. The Visconti built a fortress here between 1358 and about 1370; the Ambrosian Republic tore it down in 1447; and Francesco Sforza, victorious, began its reconstruction in 1450 as a princely residence. His son Ludovico brought Leonardo da Vinci and Bramante to decorate its rooms, and under Spanish rule the palace turned back into a citadel, ringed from the mid-sixteenth century by a star fort. Demolished in part under Napoleon, restored as a national monument by Luca Beltrami between 1891 and 1905, bombed in 1943 and rebuilt again, it is less a single building than a stratigraphy of Milanese power.

What to notice

The Torre del Filarete, the central tower Beltrami rebuilt from sixteenth-century drawings between 1900 and 1905, sets the tone of scholarly reconstruction. In the Corte Ducale, look for the loggias and the so-called Loggiato dell'Elefante; in the Rocchetta, the fortified rear refuge, the arcaded portico is the castle at its most graceful. The unmissable interiors are the Sala delle Asse, where Leonardo painted a canopy of vegetal motifs around 1498, and the purpose-built museum that holds Michelangelo's Rondanini Pietà, the sculpture he was working on in the last days of his life.

Context and history

Each owner left a layer. The Sforzas made the castle a court that drew the era's best artists; the Spanish turned it into a military garrison, and the Torre del Filarete exploded in 1521 while serving as a gunpowder store. Napoleon's engineers stripped the outer fortifications, and the parade ground beyond eventually became Parco Sempione. After unification the castle passed to the city, and Beltrami's restoration turned it into the patriotic monument and museum home it remains; the BBPR firm directed the post-war museum reconstruction after 1943. Today the castle acts as parent to six separately modelled canonical records, its civic museums ranging across the applied arts, the prehistoric collections, the Pinacoteca, the Egyptian Museum, the Museum of Musical Instruments and the Museum of Ancient Art.