Milan Culture

A city that makes things

Milan's culture rests on production rather than inheritance, and that distinction explains most of what visitors find surprising here. This is not a city that curates a past; it is a city that works, and whose cultural life is a by-product of the work. The pace is brisk, the manner direct and comparatively private, and punctuality is taken seriously in a way that is not universal in Italy. Visitors who read this as coldness are generally reading efficiency.

Design and fashion are resident, not performed

Two industries define the modern city. Furniture and design centre on the spring design week, which takes over courtyards, showrooms and palazzi across the whole city rather than confining itself to a fairground — the fuorisalone is the point, and it means the city itself becomes the exhibition. Fashion centres on the Quadrilatero della moda, which is a working wholesale and buying district as much as a retail one, and on the September and February shows.

The consequence for a visitor is that Milan's contemporary culture is genuinely available. The showrooms are open, the architecture is new and ambitious, and the city has no embarrassment about putting a 2015 tower next to a seventeenth-century facade.

The food is northern, and specific

Milanese cooking runs on butter, rice and slow braises rather than olive oil and pasta, which catches out visitors arriving with a template formed further south.

• Risotto alla milanese — short-grain rice, bone marrow and saffron, which gives it its yellow colour.
• Cotoletta alla milanese — a veal cutlet, breaded and fried in butter.
• Cassoeula — a winter stew of pork cuts and cabbage, a cold-weather dish and seasonal in practice.
• Panettone — the city's domed Christmas bread, and its most widely exported invention.

The aperitivo is a Milanese institution the rest of Italy adopted: an early-evening drink that arrives with enough food to blur into dinner, and a direct consequence of a working day that ends late.

Ambrosian Milan

The city keeps its own liturgical rite, named for Ambrose, its fourth-century bishop, and distinct from the Roman rite used in the rest of the country. This is not a curiosity for scholars: it changes the calendar. Milan's Carnival runs later than everywhere else in Italy, and the patronal feast of Sant'Ambrogio on 7 December is the city's real new year — it opens the opera season at the Teatro alla Scala and the Oh Bej! Oh Bej! street market on the same day.

Opera and the visual arts

The Teatro alla Scala's season opening on 7 December is a national event, and the house is a working theatre rather than a monument. The Pinacoteca di Brera, founded under Austrian rule, holds the city's great collection of old masters in a district that still functions as an art quarter, and the Museo del Novecento on the cathedral square covers the Italian twentieth century, including the Futurists who were largely a Milanese phenomenon.