Corso Magenta & Santa Maria delle Grazie Quarter

Corso Magenta is Milan's most elegant residential street — a tree-lined boulevard of aristocratic palazzi and Liberty-style (Italian Art Nouveau) apartment buildings that connects the Castello Sforzesco to the western suburbs and passes through the neighbourhood that contains both the Last Supper and some of the finest domestic architecture in the city.

The street's architectural highlights include the Palazzo delle Stelline (a converted 15th-century orphanage now housing a hotel and Leonardo da Vinci conference centre), the Palazzo Litta (a Baroque palace with one of Milan's most theatrical facades), and the Museo Archeologico (housed in a former Benedictine convent, with a section of the Roman city wall visible in the garden). The Liberty-style buildings along the western stretch — with their ceramic decoration, wrought-iron balconies, and the organic forms that Italian Art Nouveau borrowed from Vienna and Barcelona — are among the finest examples of the style in Milan.

The neighbourhood around Santa Maria delle Grazie has a residential calm that the centro lacks — the streets south of Corso Magenta contain neighbourhood trattorias, bakeries, and the kind of small-scale commercial life that makes Italian residential quarters liveable. The combination of the Last Supper, San Maurizio, the archaeological museum, and the Corso Magenta architecture creates one of the richest cultural walking routes in the city.