Palazzo Reale di Milano

Facing the Duomo, Milan's Royal Palace served for seven centuries as the seat of government — commune, duchy, Austrian crown, Napoleonic kingdom, Savoy monarchy — before the city turned it into the region's great exhibition palace. Its Sala delle Cariatidi, burned by wartime bombs and deliberately never restored, is now Milan's most dramatic gallery space.

Why it matters

The palace began as the Broletto Vecchio, the medieval commune's seat of power, and rose through the hands of the Torriani, Visconti and Sforza into a true ducal residence. When the French court arrived in the sixteenth century it displaced the Sforza Castle as the seat of government, and remodelling followed ever after: Pellegrino Tibaldi's late-Renaissance decorations under the Spanish governors, then Giuseppe Piermarini's severe neoclassical facade of 1773–1778 for Archduke Ferdinand, officially completed on 17 June 1778, which still defines the east side of the cathedral square. Eugène de Beauharnais ruled the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy from here as viceroy after Napoleon renamed the palace the National Palace in 1796, the Austrian governors followed, and the Savoy kings after them until the House of Savoy sold the palace to the Italian state on 11 October 1919.

What to notice

The Sala delle Cariatidi is the building's emotional core: the great ballroom created for Austrian court life — its stuccoes by Giocondo Albertolli, its frescoes by Giuliano Traballesi and Martin Knoller, above forty caryatids by Gaetano Callani — was destroyed by incendiary bombing on the night of 15 August 1943. The post-war decision to leave it as plain, scarred masonry — a testament rather than a reconstruction — gives every exhibition held beneath its skeleton a gravity that purpose-built museums cannot copy. Picasso's Guernica was shown here in 1953 as the hall's first great postwar statement. Elsewhere look for Piermarini's austere neoclassical facade and the Piazzetta Reale he laid out before it, the surviving state apartments, the staircase that launches the piano nobile, and the wing that has housed the Museo del Duomo since 2013, where the cathedral's wooden models, original statuary and stained glass are displayed.

Context and history

Restorations from 2000 onward converted the palace into a municipal exhibition venue. Its international exhibitions have included Monet, Picasso, the 2009 Futurism centenary and contemporary commissions. The palace's layered identity, from communal seat to royal residence to civic exhibition hall, makes it an architectural summary of Milanese political history on the Duomo square.