Royal Palace of Milan

Milan, Italy

The Royal Palace of Milan (Palazzo Reale di Milano) was the seat of government of the city for centuries. Today it serves as a cultural centre and home to expositions and exhibitions.

Originally designed with a structure of two courtyards, the palace was then partially demolished to make room for the Duomo. The palace is located to the right of the facade of the cathedral opposite the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. The facade of the building follows the style of the ancient courtyard, forming a recess in respect to Piazza del Duomo, known as the Piazzetta Reale.

The magnificent Hall of Caryatids can be found on the main floor of the building. It occupies the site of the old theatre, which burned down in 1776 and is the only room that survived the heavy bombings of 1943. The damage caused by the incendiary and violent air movement was followed by a state of abandonment for over two years, which contributed to further serious damage to the building. Many of the neoclassical interiors of the Palace were lost.

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Address

Piazza del Duomo 12, Milan, Italy
See all sites in Milan

Details

Founded: 13th century
Category: Palaces, manors and town halls in Italy

More Information

www.palazzorealemilano.it
it.wikipedia.org

Rating

4.5/5 (based on Google user reviews)

Interesting Sites Nearby


Milan Cathedral (0,1 km)
Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (0,3 km)
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Gallerie di Piazza Scala (0,5 km)
La Scala (0,5 km)
San Babila Church (0,7 km)
San Carlo al Corso (0,5 km)
Pinacoteca di Brera (1 km)
Basilica of San Lorenzo (0,9 km)


Bergamo Cathedral (45,4 km)
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Tempietto di Santa Croce (45,3 km)
Como Cathedral (39,7 km)
Teatro Sociale (39,6 km)
Visconti-Sforza Castle (30,7 km)
Vigevano Cathedral (30,6 km)
Royal Villa of Monza (15,9 km)
Basilica di San Fedele (39,4 km)

User Reviews

Angela Taylor (11 months ago)
There are always great art shows here and it's a beautiful palace.
Saro C (12 months ago)
A fantastic place full of Art exhibitions and with a nice coffee bar Giacomo
Graham Rogers (12 months ago)
The city was full of art, a little confusing to find in some cases, but once accessed you were not disappointed. I saw Picasso's through the ages, a metamorphosis. It was wonderful.
Evandro C. Santos (12 months ago)
Wonderful palace in a very appealing setting. Worth a visit.
Nikolas Kar (2 years ago)
Picasso's exhibition was great! it was greatly planned with respect to Greek mythology as lived by the renowned Picasso. Quite unique example of a successful combination between sculpture, painting and text. Great job!
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Kroměříž stands on the site of an earlier ford across the River Morava. The gardens and castle of Kroměříž are an exceptionally complete and well-preserved example of a European Baroque princely residence and its gardens and described as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The first residence on the site was founded by bishop Stanislas Thurzo in 1497. The building was in a Late Gothic style, with a modicum of Renaissance detail. During the Thirty Years' War, the castle was sacked by the Swedish army (1643).

It was not until 1664 that a bishop from the powerful Liechtenstein family charged architect Filiberto Lucchese with renovating the palace in a Baroque style. The chief monument of Lucchese's work in Kroměříž is the Pleasure Garden in front of the castle. Upon Lucchese's death in 1666, Giovanni Pietro Tencalla completed his work on the formal garden and had the palace rebuilt in a style reminiscent of the Turinese school to which he belonged.

After the castle was gutted by a major fire in March 1752, Bishop Hamilton commissioned two leading imperial artists, Franz Anton Maulbertsch and Josef Stern, arrived at the residence in order to decorate the halls of the palace with their works. In addition to their paintings, the palace still houses an art collection, generally considered the second finest in the country, which includes Titian's last mythological painting, The Flaying of Marsyas. The largest part of the collection was acquired by Bishop Karel in Cologne in 1673. The palace also contains an outstanding musical archive and a library of 33,000 volumes.

UNESCO lists the palace and garden among the World Heritage Sites. As the nomination dossier explains, 'the castle is a good but not outstanding example of a type of aristocratic or princely residence that has survived widely in Europe. The Pleasure Garden, by contrast, is a very rare and largely intact example of a Baroque garden'. Apart from the formal parterres there is also a less formal nineteenth-century English garden, which sustained damage during floods in 1997.

Interiors of the palace were extensively used by Miloš Forman as a stand-in for Vienna's Hofburg Imperial Palace during filming of Amadeus (1984), based on the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who actually never visited Kroměříž. The main audience chamber was also used in the film Immortal Beloved (1994), in the piano concerto scene.

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