14 Facts About the Duomo Milan That Will Surprise You

1. A duke gave away a mountain, and it is still working

On 24 October 1387, Gian Galeazzo Visconti ceded the Candoglia quarry to the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo outright, and granted free transport of the marble to Milan by waterway. Six hundred and thirty-eight years later the Fabbrica is still cutting stone from the same rock, and every replacement statue on the building comes out of it. No other cathedral in Europe owns its own quarry on those terms.

2. The whole thing is one colour because of that gift

Lombardy built in brick. Candoglia marble is pink-white with grey veining, and the decision to face an entire cathedral in it rather than in the local material is the single reason the Duomo does not look like any other church in the region. It also forced the Fabbrica to import engineers, architects, sculptors and stonecutters from across Europe, which is how a northern Gothic vocabulary arrived in an Italian city.

3. The Madonnina is made of 33 sheets of copper

The Madonnina is 4.16 metres tall, gilded, and assembled from 33 embossed copper sheets. She has stood on the tip of the Main Spire 108.5 metres above Milan since the end of 1774. You cannot get close to her from the terraces. The only way to see her at eye level is the full-size replica in the Duomo Museum, which your cathedral ticket already covers.

4. There are more than 3,400 statues on it

Plus 150 gargoyles, 96 giants and 410 corbels waiting to carry statues. The 135 spires on the roof are mostly about 17 metres tall each. Walk the terraces and you are surrounded by more carved figures than most cities own, almost none of them labelled, almost all of them different.

5. The roof is the same size as the room underneath it

The central terrace covers about 1,530 square metres — the same footprint as the nave below. You are standing on the ceiling of the church, at 45 metres, on marble, in the open air. That is what the €16 buys and it is a genuinely strange thing to be able to do.

6. The lift only goes halfway

It reaches the first level and no further. There are around 80 steps above it, and the Fabbrica's own access regulations put the descent on the stairs whichever way you came up. The full stair route is 251 steps. Every listing that says "lift to the rooftops" is telling the truth and not the whole of it, which is why the rooftop page spells it out.

7. Leonardo entered a competition here and lost

At the end of the fifteenth century the crossing tower was still open and the Fabbrica ran a competition to close it. Leonardo da Vinci submitted a design. So did others. None of the entries was built as drawn, and the tiburio that went up is a committee compromise.

8. Napoleon finished the front

He was crowned King of Italy in the cathedral in 1805 and ordered the facade completed, which was carried out between 1807 and 1813 with the state paying. The building had been going for four hundred and twenty years by then and the front was still unfinished. The history page follows the whole chain.

9. The last door was hung in 1965

The five bronze doors went up between 1909 and 1965. Somebody alive today watched the Duomo di Milano get its last door. Restoration of the tiburio and the dome began again in 2016 and continues now, which means the honest answer to "when was it finished" is that it has not been.

10. Ambrose baptised Augustine under the front steps

The Baptistery of San Giovanni alle Fonti was built in 378 and stood where the nave now runs. In 387, Ambrose baptised Augustine in its octagonal font. Milan was the capital of the Western Roman Empire at the time. The building was demolished and buried from about 1386 to make room for the cathedral, and the font is still down there under the paving.

11. Milan's UNESCO site is a different building

This is the one visitors get wrong most often. Milan has one property on the UNESCO World Heritage List, and it is the Church and Dominican Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie with Leonardo's Last Supper, inscribed in 1980. That is 1.5 kilometres west of the cathedral. It is also exactly why so many tours pair the two.

12. There is a working astronomical instrument in the floor

A brass meridian line runs across the north aisle with zodiac markers along it, and a small aperture high in the south wall throws a spot of sun onto it at solar noon. Astronomers laid it to fix the calendar. People walk over it all day.

13. A saint carries his own skin in the south transept

Marco d'Agrate's Saint Bartholomew has been flayed and wears the skin over his shoulder like a cloak. The musculature is anatomically accurate, which was the point. It is the single most photographed object inside the building and the least comfortable.

14. There are no toilets anywhere in it

Not on the terraces, not in the cathedral, not at the Piazza Duomo 14/A ticket office. They are in the Duomo Museum across the square, or outside for a fee. This is the most practically useful fact on this list and the one no guidebook prints.

The numbers in one place

Sources and the rest of the figures are on facts and figures. If you want somebody to point at all of this on the spot, a best duomo tour milan does it in two hours.

The one to remember

Fourteen facts and the one that will change your day is the toilets. Everything else on Duomo Milan Tours is about which ticket gets you where.

See the numbers on the building itself

Duomo Milan: Cathedral and Terraces Entrance Ticket

The Fabbrica's own ticket: church, terraces, museum and San Gottardo, valid 48 hours.

From $30 per person

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Duomo Milan Rooftop and Cathedral Guided Tour with Tickets

Two guided hours, lift to the terraces, skip-the-line at both doors.

From $80 per person

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Milan: Cathedral and Terraces Guided Tour with Tickets

Camparino to the cathedral by way of the medieval centre; terraces cost extra.

From $551 per group, up to 2

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