Why go

The Museo del Novecento brings together Milan’s civic collection of 20th-century Italian art in the Palazzo dell’Arengario, the twin-towered building on the south side of Piazza del Duomo. Built in the 1930s and converted into a museum that opened in 2010, it is worth visiting as much for its setting as for its art: the upper floors look straight out at the cathedral’s spires.

The collection tells the story of modern Italian art in a compact, logical route, from the social realism of the early 1900s through the explosive energy of Futurism to the abstraction, spatial experiments and conceptual art of the post-war decades.

What to see

  • The Fourth Estate. Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s monumental painting of striking workers, at the top of the spiral entrance ramp.
  • The Futurists. Umberto Boccioni’s sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space and works by Balla, Carrà and Severini.
  • Metaphysical painting. Giorgio de Chirico and Giorgio Morandi.
  • Lucio Fontana. His slashed canvases and the swirling neon ceiling he designed in 1951, beside a window onto the Duomo.
  • Post-war art. Piero Manzoni, Arte Povera and other movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

Plan your visit

The museum opens Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 7.30pm, staying open until 10.30pm on Thursdays, with last entry an hour before closing. It is closed on Mondays, 25 December, 1 January and 1 May.

Under the city’s tariffs in force since May 2026, a full ticket costs €10 and a reduced ticket €5 for over 65s, 18 to 25s and university students. Open-date tickets cost €11 and €6. Entry is free for everyone on the first Sunday of the month, when online booking is not possible, and for visitors up to 25 on the second Tuesday of the month. Temporary exhibitions are included.

Allow an hour and a half to two hours. The route climbs through the building, so start at the ground floor and work upwards to finish with the views.

Getting there

Duomo station on Metro lines M1 and M3 is about 250 metres away, and several tram lines stop in the square. The entrance faces the Duomo, beside the Palazzo Reale.

Tips

Thursday evenings are the quietest and most atmospheric time to visit, with the cathedral lit up outside the windows. Pair the museum with the Duomo rooftop for two very different views of the square. There is a café and a bookshop, and the cloakroom near the entrance takes coats and bags.

If time is short, prioritise the top floors: The Fourth Estate, the Futurist rooms and the Fontana room give a clear sense of the collection in under an hour. Temporary exhibitions, often devoted to a single 20th-century artist, are shown in rooms on the lower floors and change through the year.

Nearby

The Palazzo Reale next door stages major exhibitions, and the Duomo, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II and La Scala are all within five minutes’ walk. Just south, the little church of Santa Maria presso San Satiro hides Bramante’s famous false perspective apse.