If you wish to spend an afternoon immersed in art in Milan, here is a suggestion for those who want to escape from the hustle and bustle of the city's shopping streets.
A few minutes walk from the Duomo, you can visit the
Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, well known for housing beautiful collections of arts, one of the most excellent Library and an Academy. The famous Leonardo da Vinci codex '
Codice Atlantico' that includes several drawings, writings and projects by the artist is stored here. The Institution was founded in 1618 by Federico Borromeo, cardinal of Milan at that time.
The Pinacoteca consists of twenty-four rooms, each one divided according to the work's period of belonging which corresponds to the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries respectively. Overall, the old masters like Caravaggio, Hayez, Canaletto, Titian, Raphael, Tiepolo and many more.
Jan Brueghel, il Redentore, la Vergine e quattro scene sacre
Tiziano Vecellio studio, Maddalena
The visit can be planned according to everyone's convenience; therefore, the management has created three different tours, lasting less than one hour, one hour or more than sixty minutes. Other special ways of visit are appointed for families, groups, researchers and religious persons.
As for its interconnection with the Ambrosiana Library (founded in 1607), the guests will be immersed in thousands of multilingual volumes, maps, writings, etchings, prints and almost one million of books dating back at the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The incredible building has considerable interiors and mesmerising ambiences that reveal floors and walls decorated with coloured mosaics in geometrical shapes, internal marble balustrades surrounded by niches with statues of illustrious men, balconies full of plants and busts and internal porticos of shiny grey columns that outline an effect of real magnificence. When it comes to the the first floor, the view of the internal cloister and the classical architecture will be more defined to the eyes.
