The History of the Duomo Milan

Six hundred years, one quarry and a building that was consecrated thirty-two years after work began and finished five and a half centuries after that. The Duomo di Milano is the longest-running construction project in Italy, and the organisation set up to manage it in 1387 is still managing it now.

1386: a Gothic decision in a brick city

Work began in 1386, on a square that already held two churches. Santa Maria Maggiore, the ninth-century winter basilica, and Santa Tecla, the fourth-century summer one, both stood where the nave now runs, and both came down to make room. Lombardy built in brick. This one was to be Gothic, in stone, and on a scale no city north of the Alps would have attempted lightly. That choice came from the Visconti court, not from local practice.

1387: the Fabbrica and the Candoglia quarry

In October 1387 the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo was founded at the instigation of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Lord of Milan, to design and build the church. On 24 October the same year he ceded the Candoglia quarry to it outright and granted free transport of the marble down the waterways to Milan.

That single grant is why the building looks the way it does. Candoglia marble is pink-white and veined grey, quarried above Lake Maggiore. The Fabbrica has been cutting it from the same rock for six hundred and thirty-eight years. Choosing it over Lombard brick also forced the Fabbrica to recruit engineers, architects, sculptors and stonecutters from across Europe. That is how a French and German Gothic vocabulary arrived in an Italian city.

1418: a consecrated altar in an unfinished church

On 16 October 1418, Pope Martin V, returning from the Council of Constance, consecrated the high altar. The church around it was three decades old and nothing like complete. This is the pattern the whole project follows: the building was used continuously while it was being built, and the parts that mattered liturgically were finished first.

Leonardo, the tiburio and the competition nobody won

By the end of the fifteenth century the crossing tower — the tiburio — was still open, and the Fabbrica ran a competition for it. Leonardo da Vinci was among the architects who submitted designs. None of the entries was built as drawn. The tiburio that went up is a compromise arrived at by committee — a fair description of the facade too.

The Borromeo century

Carlo Borromeo was Archbishop of Milan from 1564 to 1584, his cousin Federigo from 1595 to 1631. The Council of Trent had issued its Counter-Reformation decrees between 1545 and 1563, and those shaped what the two of them did with the interior. The Quadroni di San Carlo, the great canvases still hung through the nave in the autumn, belong to that period. So does the cult around the crypt beneath the choir, which still carries Carlo's name.

1805: Napoleon finishes the facade

The old front of Santa Maria Maggiore came down in 1683, and the facade was still unfinished more than a century later. Napoleon was crowned King of Italy in the cathedral in 1805 and ordered the work completed. It was carried out between 1807 and 1813, with the state paying. The Main Spire had gone up between 1765 and 1770 under Francesco Croce, and the Madonnina was raised to the top of it in 1774. By the time the front was finished, the skyline was already the one Milan knows.

1965: the last door, and the work that never stops

The bronze doors were hung between 1909 and 1965; the last of the five went up within living memory. The spires were restored first in 1840 and again through the 1960s and 1970s, and restoration of the tiburio and the dome began in 2016 and continues. The Fabbrica's quarry is still open, its workshops still cut replacement statues, and every spire on the roof carries a maintenance history rather than a completion date.

The dates in one place