We landed at Linate, dropped the bags, and walked straight out the door. No plan to rest. No easing in. This was Italy — and we weren’t going to waste a minute of it.
We had one day in Milan. One day before the trip moved on to Lake Garda, Verona, and eventually Venice. So the night before we flew, I’d done what I always do — opened a map, traced a route, and built a walk that would cover as much ground as possible without feeling like a forced march through a guidebook.
Linate is a good airport for this. Small, calm, close to the city. We were through arrivals and on a bus before we’d even had time to think about what came next. The hotel was quick. The bags went down. And then we went straight back out.
It was a Thursday afternoon in early May and Milan was warm, blue-skied, and quietly magnificent.
We started in Parco Sempione — the city’s great green lung — which is the right way to arrive anywhere. The park absorbs the noise of the city and gives it back to you slowly. The Castello Sforzesco anchors the far end; locals were already out on the grass by mid-afternoon, the kind of scene that looks entirely unrehearsed.
Parco Sempione — the castle framed at the end of the avenue, Milanese Thursday afternoon in full swing.
The lily ponds in Parco Sempione. Still and shadowed. The city feels very far away.
Cavour’s statue, standing in the trees. The park doesn’t make a fuss about it.
From the park we followed the long straight axis north to the Arco della Pace — Napoleon’s triumphal arch, started in his honour and finished long after he’d gone. Six bronze horses charge across the top of it into a sky that felt almost theatrical.
The Arco della Pace. Started for Napoleon, finished without him. The horses don’t seem to mind.
Then we turned west — away from the tourist trail, into territory most visitors skip entirely — and found ourselves at the Cimitero Monumentale. Not hidden exactly, it’s enormous, but somehow overlooked. The colonnaded entrance portico wouldn’t be out of place in ancient Rome.
The entrance colonnade at Cimitero Monumentale. Italian flags, a Red Star lantern, and the mausoleum beyond.
The mausoleum tower — backlit, flowers at its base. We stayed longer than we expected to.
Largo Caduti Milanesi per la Patria — the square outside the cemetery gates. The fountain, the plaque, the name.
We looped back through the university quarter — past the brick facade of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, all clock tower and Italian flags — and into Brera.
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. The clock, the flags, the figure above the door.
Brera is the neighbourhood that Milan saves for people who know where to look. Narrow streets, baroque churches wedged between apartment buildings. On one corner a medieval tower rose above the rooftops like it had wandered in from a different century. We ducked into a courtyard and found a restaurant already setting up for the evening — tables in the shade, nobody else around, the kind of place you only find on foot.
The Brera tower — medieval, unannounced, above the rooftops. Milan does this without warning.
A Brera courtyard, setting up for the evening. Not in any guidebook we’ve seen.
A baroque church in the Brera streets — saints on the roofline, a car in the way. Milan layers its centuries without apology.
And then the city pulled us in. There’s no resisting the Duomo. You turn a corner and suddenly you’re in the Piazza — and it’s overwhelming in the best way. The white marble facade rises above the crowds and the noise and the pigeons.
The Duomo di Milano. You turn a corner and there it is. No amount of preparation helps.
Piazza del Duomo — the square doing what it does on a warm May Thursday.
We took the obligatory selfie. The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II was next — and the glass dome overhead is so beautiful it stops conversation.
Us. The Duomo. We were not going to not take this.
The entrance arch of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II — the dome visible through the arch, the square still pouring in.
Inside the Galleria — the dome, the gilded plasterwork, and Louis Vuitton underneath. As normal as you’d expect.
Leonardo da Vinci watched us leave from his plinth outside La Scala — surrounded by trees, slightly apart from everything, as he probably preferred.
Leonardo outside La Scala. In the trees, slightly apart, looking entirely unbothered.
By the time we made it back the legs were starting to feel it. Nearly eight miles. Over 16,000 steps. Three hours of moving through a city that had been, until that afternoon, just a name on an itinerary.
Italy had made its first impression. It was a good one.
Milan, Lombardy – 7.91 miles – 3hrs 02m – 95ft – 16,766 steps