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Italian commune and capital city of Lombardy
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Milan is the capital and largest city of the region of Lombardy, in northern Italy, and the seat of the Metropolitan City of Milan. It is the second-largest city in Italy after the country's capital, Rome, with a population of 1,362,863 in 2026. The city's wider metropolitan area is the largest in Italy, and the fourth-largest in the European Union, with an estimated population of 6.55 million. Milan is considered Italy's economic capital, and its metropolitan area accounts for about 20% of the country's GDP.
Founded around 590 BC by a Celtic tribe, Milan was conquered by the Romans in 222 BC, who Latinized the name of the city into Mediolanum. From AD 284 to 402, it served as capital of the western part of the Roman Empire. In the Late Medieval period, the wealthy Duchy of Milan was one of the greatest forces behind the Renaissance. As a major center of the Italian Enlightenment during the Early modern period, Milan's cultural and political struggle against Austrian domination was crucial in the reunification of the Kingdom of Italy. From the 19th century onwards, Milan led the industrial and financial development of Italy.
Milan is a major international center of industry, finance, science, communications, fashion, art and tourism. Milan was classified as an "Alpha" city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. Milan's business district hosts Borsa Italiana, Italy's main stock exchange (part of the Euronext consortium, the world's sixth-largest by market capitalization) and the headquarters of numerous national corporations, including eight Fortune 500 Europe companies. As of 2023, Milan and its special metropolitan authority have the largest GDP and the highest per-capita GDP of any Italian province.
Milan is a global fashion capital and a major international tourist destination, being one of the most visited cities in the world, ranked second in Italy after Rome, fifth in Europe and sixteenth in the world. The city is a major cultural center, with museums and art galleries that feature some of the most important collections in the world, including major works by Leonardo da Vinci. Milan hosts numerous educational institutions, including academies and universities that account for 11% of the national total of enrolled students. Milan hosts several international events and fairs, including Milan Fashion Week and the Milan Furniture Fair, which are among the world's largest in terms of revenue, visitors and growth. Milan has many luxury hotels and is the fifth most starred in the world by the Michelin Guide. It hosted the Universal Exposition in 1906 and 2015. In the field of sports, Milan is home to two of Europe's most successful football teams, AC Milan and Internazionale Milano (Inter Milan), and one of Europe's main basketball teams, Olimpia Milano. The city also co-hosted the Winter Olympic and Paralympic games in 2026.
Milan was founded with the Celtic name of Medhelanon, later Latinized by the ancient Romans into Mediolanum. In Celtic language medhe- meant "middle, center" and the name element -lanon is the Celtic equivalent of Latin -planum "plain", meant "(settlement) in the midst of the plain", or of "place between watercourses" (Celtic medhe = "in the middle, central"; land or lan = "land"), given the presence of the Olona, Lambro, Seveso rivers and the Nirone and Pudiga streams.
The Latin name Mediolanum comes from the Latin words medio (in the middle) and planus (plain). Some scholars believe that lanum comes from the Celtic root lan, meaning an enclosure or demarcated territory (source of the Welsh word llan, meaning "a sanctuary or church", ultimately cognate to English/German Land) in which Celtic communities used to build shrines.
Hence Mediolanum could signify the central town or sanctuary of a Celtic tribe. About sixty Gallo-Roman sites in France bore the name "Mediolanum", for example: Saintes (Mediolanum Santonum) and Évreux (Mediolanum Aulercorum). Another theory links the name to the scrofa semilanuta ("half-woolly sow") an ancient emblem of the city, fancifully accounted for in Andrea Alciato's Emblemata (1584), beneath a woodcut of the first raising of the city walls, where a boar is seen lifted from the excavation, and the etymology of Mediolanum given as "half-wool", explained in Latin and in French.
According to this theory, the foundation of Milan is credited to two Celtic peoples, the Bituriges and the Aedui, having as their emblems a ram and a boar. Therefore "The city's symbol is a wool-bearing boar, an animal of double form, here with sharp bristles, there with sleek wool." Alciato credits Ambrose for his account.
Around 590 BC a Celtic tribe belonging to the Insubres group and belonging to the Golasecca culture settled the city under the name Medhelanon. According to the legend reported by Livy (writing between 27 and 9 BC), the Gaulish king Ambicatus sent his nephew Bellovesus into northern Italy at the head of a party drawn from various Gaulish tribes; Bellovesus allegedly founded the settlement in the times of the Roman monarchy, during the reign of Tarquinius Priscus. Tarquin is traditionally recorded as reigning from 616 to 579 BC, according to ancient Roman historian Titus Livy.
Medhelanon, in particular, was developed around a sanctuary, which was the oldest area of the village. The sanctuary, which consisted of a wooded area in the shape of an ellipse with a central clearing, was aligned according to precise astronomical points. For this reason, it was used for religious gatherings, especially in particular celebratory moments. The sanctuary of Medhelanon was an ellipse with axes of 443 m (1,453 ft) and 323 m (1,060 ft) located near Piazza della Scala.
The urban planning profile was based on these early paths, and on the shape of the sanctuary, reached, in some cases, up to the 19th century and even beyond. For example, the route of the modern Corso Vittorio Emanuele, Piazza del Duomo, Piazza Cordusio and Via Broletto, which is curvilinear, could correspond to the south side of the ellipse of the ancient sanctuary of Medhelanon.
One axis of the Medhelanon sanctuary was aligned towards the heliacal rising of Antares, while the other towards the heliacal rising of Capella. The latter coincided with a Celtic spring festival celebrated on 24 March, while the heliacal rising of Antares corresponded with 11 November, which opened and closed the Celtic year and which coincided with the point where the Sun rose on the winter solstice. About two centuries after the creation of the Celtic sanctuary, the first residential settlements began to be built around it. Medhelanon then transformed from a simple religious center to an urban and then military centre, thus becoming a real village.
The first homes were built just south of the Celtic sanctuary, near the modern Royal Palace of Milan. Subsequently, with the growth of the town centre, other important buildings for the Medhelanon community were built. First, a temple dedicated to the goddess Belisama was built, which was located near the modern Milan Cathedral. Then, near the modern Via Moneta, which is located near today's Piazza San Sepolcro, a fortified building with military functions was built which was surrounded by a defensive moat.
During the Roman Republic, the Romans, led by consul Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio Calvus, fought the Insubres and captured the settlement in 222 BC. The chief of the Insubres then submitted to Rome, giving the Romans control of the settlement. The Romans eventually conquered the entirety of the region, calling the new province "Cisalpine Gaul" (Latin: Gallia Cisalpina)—"Gaul this side of the Alps"—and may have given the city its Latinized name of Mediolanum: in Gaulish *medio- meant "middle, centre" and the name element -lanon is the Celtic equivalent of Latin -planum "plain", thus *Mediolanon (Latinized as Mediolānum) meant "(settlement) in the midst of the plain". Mediolanum became the most important center of Cisalpine Gaul and, in the wake of economic development, in 49 BC, was elevated, within the Lex Roscia, to the status of municipium.
The ancient Celtic settlement was, from a topographic point of view, superimposed and replaced by the Roman one. The Roman city was then gradually superimposed and replaced by the medieval one. The urban center of Milan has therefore grown constantly and rapidly, until modern times, around the first Celtic nucleus. The original Celtic toponym Medhelanon then changed, as evidenced by a graffiti in Celtic language present on a section of the Roman walls of Milan which dates back to a period following the Roman conquest of the Celtic village, in Mesiolano. In 286, the Roman Emperor Diocletian moved the capital of the Western Roman Empire from Rome to Mediolanum. Diocletian himself chose to reside at Nicomedia in the Eastern Empire, leaving his colleague Maximian at Milan.
During the Augustan age Mediolanum was famous for its schools; it possessed a theatre and an amphitheatre (129.5 x 109.3 m), the third largest in Roman Italy after the Colosseum in Rome and the vast amphitheatre in Capua. A large stone wall encircled the city in Caesar's time, and later was expanded in the late third century AD, by Maximian. Maximian built several gigantic monuments including the large circus (470 × 85 metres) and the thermae or Baths of Hercules, a large complex of imperial palaces and other services and buildings of which few visible traces remain. Maximian increased the city area to 375 acres by surrounding it with a new, larger stone wall (about 4.5 km long) with many 24-sided towers. The monumental area had twin towers; the one included later in the construction of the convent of San Maurizio Maggiore remains 16.6 m high.
It was from Mediolanum that the Emperor Constantine issued what is now known as the Edict of Milan in AD 313, granting tolerance to all religions within the Empire, thus paving the way for Christianity to become the dominant religion of the Empire. Constantine was in Mediolanum to celebrate the wedding of his sister to the Eastern Emperor, Licinius. In 402, the Visigoths besieged the city and the Emperor Honorius moved the Imperial residence to Ravenna. In 452, Attila besieged the city, but the real break with the city's Imperial past came in 539, during the Gothic War, when Uraias (a nephew of Witiges, formerly King of the Italian Ostrogoths) carried out a siege of Milan, and after capitulation, according to Procopius, 300,000 male citizens were executed and the women sold to the allies of the Goths for assisting in the siege. The Lombards took Ticinum as their capital in 572 (renaming it Papia – the modern Pavia), and left early-medieval Milan to the governance of its archbishops.
After the siege of the city by the Visigoths in 402, the imperial residence moved to Ravenna. Attila, King of the Huns, sacked and devastated the city in 452 AD. In 539 the Ostrogoths conquered and destroyed Milan during the Gothic War against Byzantine Emperor Justinian I. In the summer of 569 the Lombards (from whom the name of the Italian region Lombardy derives), conquered Milan, overpowering the small Byzantine garrison left for its defence. Some Roman structures remained in use in Milan under Lombard rule. Milan surrendered to Charlemagne and the Franks in 774.
The 11th century saw a reaction against the control of the Holy Roman Emperors. City-states emerged in northern Italy, an expression of the new political power of the cities and their will to fight against all feudal powers. Milan was no exception. It did not take long, however, for the Italian city-states to begin fighting each other to try to limit neighbouring powers. The Milanese destroyed Lodi and continuously warred with Pavia, Cremona and Como, who in turn asked Frederick I Barbarossa for help. In a sally they captured Empress Beatrice and forced her to ride a donkey backward through the city until getting out. Frederick I Barbarossa brought the destruction of much of Milan in 1162.
A period of peace followed and Milan prospered as a centre of trade due to its geographical position. During this time, the city was considered one of the largest European cities. As a result of the independence that the Lombard cities gained in the Peace of Constance in 1183, Milan returned to the commune form of local government first established in the 11th century.
In 1395, Gian Galeazzo Visconti became the first Duke of Milan upon receiving the title from Wenceslaus, King of the Romans. In 1447, Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, died without a male heir. Following the end of the Visconti line, the Ambrosian Republic was established; it took its name from St. Ambrose, the popular patron saint of the city. Both the Guelph and the Ghibelline factions worked together to bring about the Ambrosian Republic in Milan. In 1450, the Republic collapsed when Milan was conquered by Francesco I of the House of Sforza, which made Milan one of the leading cities of the Italian Renaissance. Under the House of Sforza, Milan experienced a period of great prosperity, which in particular saw the development of mulberry cultivation and silk processing.
Following this economic growth, works such as the Sforza Castle (already existing in the Visconti era under the name of Porta Giovia Castle, but re-adapted, enlarged and completed by the Sforza family) and the Ospedale Maggiore were completed. The Sforzas also managed to attract to Milan personalities such as Leonardo da Vinci, who redesigned and improved the function of the navigli and painted The Last Supper, and Bramante, who worked on the church of Santa Maria presso San Satiro, on the basilica of Sant'Ambrogio and to the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, influencing the development of the Lombard Renaissance.
Milan's last independent ruler, Lodovico il Moro, requested the aid of Charles VIII of France against the other Italian states, eventually unleashing the Italian Wars. The king's cousin, Louis of Orléans, took part in the expedition and realized most of Italy was virtually defenseless. This prompted him to come back a few years later in 1500, and claim the Duchy of Milan for himself, his grandmother having been a member of the ruling Visconti family. At that time, Milan was also defended by Swiss mercenaries. After the victory of Louis's successor François I over the Swiss at the Battle of Marignan, the duchy was promised to the French king François I. When the Emperor Charles V defeated Francis I at the Battle of Pavia in 1525, French rule in the Duchy of Milan came to an end. In 1535, the Sforza line went extinct.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Milan”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.