Milan through the ages

The city began as Medhelanon, settled around 590 BC by a Celtic tribe of the Insubres group belonging to the Golasecca culture; Livy's account puts the foundation at about 600 BC and credits it to Belloveso, chief of the Insubres. The name is read as a settlement in the midst of the plain, or as a place between watercourses — the Seveso and Lambro to the east, the Pudiga, Nirone and Olona to the west.

The settlement grew around a sanctuary near the modern Piazza della Scala, an elliptical wooded enclosure aligned on precise astronomical points and used for religious gatherings. Houses appeared around it about two centuries later, and Medhelanon turned from a religious site into a village and then a military one: a temple to the goddess Belisama stood near the site of the cathedral, and a fortified building ringed by a moat, dated to the fourth century BC, has been found at Via Moneta.

Roman legions under the consul Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio Calvus captured the settlement in 222 BC and the Insubrian chief submitted; the region became the province of Cisalpine Gaul, and the town, Latinised as Mediolanum, was raised to the status of municipium in 49 BC. Its weight came from the roads, as the hub of the northern Italian network, and from a country that Polybius describes as abounding in wine, grain and fine wool. In 286 Diocletian moved the capital of the Western Roman Empire from Rome to Mediolanum, residing himself at Nicomedia and leaving his colleague Maximian here; Maximian enclosed 375 acres within a new stone wall about 4.5 kilometres round and built a circus, baths and a complex of imperial palaces.

It was from Mediolanum in 313, where he had come for the wedding of his sister to the eastern emperor Licinius, that Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, granting tolerance to all religions in the empire. The Arian controversy divided the city's Christians in the mid-fourth century, at times leaving rival bishops, and under Ambrose, bishop from 374 to 397, the city reached the height of its ancient power. The Visigoths besieged it in 402 and Honorius moved the imperial residence to Ravenna; Attila besieged it in 452; and in 539, during the Gothic War, Uraias attacked Milan with losses put by Procopius at about 300,000 men. The Lombards took the city in 569 and made Pavia their capital in 572, leaving early medieval Milan to the government of its archbishops.

Milan surrendered to Charlemagne and the Franks in 774, its aristocracy and most of its clergy having taken refuge in Genoa; the city grew poorer and became a county seat. The eleventh century brought a reaction against the Holy Roman Emperors and the birth of the city-state, and Milan destroyed Lodi and fought Pavia, Cremona and Como, who called in Frederick Barbarossa. The Milanese captured the Empress Beatrice and forced her to ride a donkey backwards out of the city; much of Milan was destroyed in 1162, and with fire in the storehouses holding its whole food supply the city surrendered within days. The independence the Lombard cities won in the Peace of Constance in 1183 restored the commune, and Milan, well placed for trade, was considered one of the largest cities in Europe. Its chief industries were armaments and wool.

Martino della Torre, elected Capitano del Popolo by the guilds in 1259, took the city by force, paved streets, dug canals, taxed the countryside and emptied the treasury. His family and the Visconti then fought a civil war of more than a decade, which Ottone Visconti ended by winning the city at the Battle of Desio in 1277; the Visconti ruled into the fifteenth century, and in 1395 the Emperor Wenceslaus raised Milan to a duchy under Gian Galeazzo Visconti. Archbishop Antonio de' Saluzzi began the new cathedral in 1386, for which the two basilicas of the old episcopal complex were demolished. When Filippo Maria Visconti died without a male heir in 1447 the Ambrosian Republic was proclaimed; it collapsed in 1450 when Francesco Sforza took the city. Under the Sforza the duchy prospered on mulberry cultivation and silk processing, and drew Leonardo da Vinci, who redesigned the navigli and painted The Last Supper.

Milan's last independent ruler, Lodovico Sforza, called the French king Charles VIII into Italy expecting an ally; Louis of Orléans came with that expedition, judged Italy defenceless, and returned in 1500 to claim the duchy. It changed hands through the Italian Wars until Charles V defeated Francis I at Pavia in 1525; when Francesco II Sforza died ten years later it passed to the Emperor, and on Charles's abdication in 1556 to Philip II and the Spanish Habsburgs. A hundred and fifty years of Spanish rule followed. Lombardy was valuable to Spain as an armoury and a source of men: during the Franco-Spanish War of 1635–59 Milan sent and paid for an average of 4,000 soldiers a year, many of them serving in the Low Countries against the Dutch.

The Great Plague of 1629–31 killed an estimated 60,000 people out of a population of 130,000 — one of the last outbreaks of the pandemic that had begun with the Black Death, and the epidemic Alessandro Manzoni described in The Betrothed. The plague and the arrival of the German army brought demographic and economic collapse, and stagnation lasted into the middle of the eighteenth century. When the Spanish Habsburg line ended in 1700 the War of the Spanish Succession followed; the French were beaten at Turin in 1706, and the treaties of Utrecht and Rastatt in 1713–14 confirmed Austrian sovereignty over Lombardy and its capital.

Reform under Maria Theresa and Joseph II returned the city to cultural and economic weight from the middle of the eighteenth century, and the institutions the Austrians founded or sponsored include the Teatro alla Scala, the Brera Academy — housed in a convent confiscated from the Jesuits — and the Braidense library, which Maria Theresa made public. Napoleon invaded in 1796, and Milan was capital of the Transpadane Republic, then the Cisalpine Republic, the Italian Republic and, from 1805 to 1814, the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy; on 26 May 1805 he crowned himself King of Italy in the cathedral with the Iron Crown. The Congress of Vienna returned Lombardy to Austria, and Milan became capital of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, formally independent and in practice subject to the Austrian Empire, its highest governorships reserved for Austrian aristocrats.

On 18 March 1848 the city rose against Austrian rule in the Five Days, forcing Field Marshal Radetzky to withdraw; Piedmont-Sardinia sent troops, beginning the First Italian War of Independence, and a plebiscite ratified union with Piedmont by a large majority. Austrian forces routed the Piedmontese at Custoza on 24 July and reasserted control over northern Italy. In 1859 French and Italian troops beat the Austrians at Solferino, Milan and the rest of Lombardy were incorporated into Piedmont-Sardinia, and the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed on 17 March 1861.

Unification confirmed Milan's economic hold on northern Italy. A rail network begun under the Austrians made the city the rail hub of the north and, with the Gotthard tunnel of 1882 and the Simplon of 1906, the main southern European hub for goods and passengers; abundant hydroelectric power built up steel and textiles, and Milanese banks dominated Italian finance. In May 1898 troops under General Fiorenzo Bava Beccaris fired on demonstrators protesting the soaring cost of living. Government figures gave at least 80 demonstrators killed, along with two soldiers, and 450 wounded. The suppression brought down Antonio Di Rudinì's government in July and created a constitutional crisis.

The city elected its first socialist mayor, Emilio Caldara, in 1914, and on 14 November of that year Benito Mussolini, still a member of the Socialist Party, began printing Il Popolo d'Italia in Milan. His Blackshirts held their first rally in Piazza San Sepolcro, and he launched the March on Rome from the city on 28 October 1922. In the Second World War Allied bombing did extensive damage to Milan's industry and transport and often struck residential districts. German forces occupied and plundered northern Italy after the Italian surrender in 1943, and a large resistance movement grew, in which the city's factories and those of neighbouring Sesto San Giovanni counted for much. On 25 April 1945 the National Liberation Committee proclaimed an insurrection and the city was liberated the same day; on 29 April the resistance executed Mussolini, his mistress and several officers of the regime, whose bodies were hanged in Piazzale Loreto, where resistance members had been executed a year earlier.

La Scala, rebuilt from bomb damage in a year, reopened on 11 May 1946 under Arturo Toscanini, returned from his long American exile; rubble from the bombing was piled into the artificial hill of Monte Stella, whose Giardino dei Giusti commemorates opponents of genocide and crimes against humanity with a tree to each. The industrial triangle of Milan, Turin and Genoa drove the Italian economic miracle. Large firms recruited in the south by posting notices in its towns and offering a bed in company housing; the population rose from 1.3 million in 1951 to 1.7 million in 1967 and peaked at 1,743,427 in 1973, after which about a third of the inhabitants moved out to the suburbs and satellite settlements.

Prosperity was overshadowed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the Years of Lead, with street violence, strikes and political terrorism; on 12 December 1969 a bomb at the National Agrarian Bank in Piazza Fontana killed 17 people and injured 88. Milanese houses such as Armani, Prada and Versace made the city a fashion capital in the 1980s, and in the 1990s the Tangentopoli corruption trials, a severe financial crisis and steady decline in textiles, cars and steel hit it hard. Former industrial land carried the rebuilding that followed: the Porta Nuova and CityLife districts went up within a decade, and new university campuses were built at Bovisa and Bicocca.

Two waves of migration remade the population: internal migrants from the rural south from the 1950s to the early 1970s, then foreign-born arrivals from the late 1980s onwards — from Africa, eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America — rising from about 58,000 foreign-born residents at the start of the 1990s to 269,397 in 2024, 19.6 per cent of the municipality. The Chinese community, the oldest in Italy, was established in the 1920s around Via Paolo Sarpi by immigrants from Wencheng County who ran small textile and leather workshops; the Jewish community, about 10,000 strong and mainly Sephardi, is the second largest in Italy, its main synagogue built in 1892. The comune had 1,366,155 residents in 2025, and its metropolitan area accounts for about a fifth of Italy's GDP.