Pinacoteca di Brera

The Pinacoteca di Brera is Milan's most important art gallery — a collection of Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting that rivals the Uffizi in Florence and contains some of the most reproduced images in Italian art. Raphael's 'Marriage of the Virgin,' Mantegna's devastating 'Lamentation over the Dead Christ' (with its radical foreshortening), Caravaggio's 'Supper at Emmaus,' and Piero della Francesca's 'Brera Madonna' are among the masterpieces in a collection that represents the peak of Italian painting.

The gallery occupies the first floor of the Palazzo di Brera, a 17th-century Jesuit college that also houses the Brera Academy of Fine Art, the Braidense National Library, and the Brera Botanical Garden. The courtyard, with its bronze statue of Napoleon as a classical nude (Napoleon founded the gallery in 1809, filling it with works confiscated from churches and monasteries across northern Italy), provides the entrance to both the gallery and the surrounding Brera neighbourhood.

The Brera district — a grid of narrow streets around Via Brera and Via Fiori Chiari — is Milan's art quarter, with galleries, design studios, and the kind of independent shops that survive in a neighbourhood where cultural institutions keep the rents just below the level that would push them out. The Brera Botanical Garden, a small walled garden behind the palazzo, is a peaceful retreat that most gallery visitors miss entirely — a green room of medicinal plants, ancient trees, and the quiet that only walled gardens in the middle of cities can produce.