Milan Cathedral
Milan Cathedral took almost six hundred years to build and is one of the largest churches in the world. It is clad entirely in marble with a pink sheen. The roof is a forest of spires and statues that visitors can walk around on.
Work began in 1386 under Archbishop Antonio da Saluzzo and Milan’s ruler Gian Galeazzo Visconti, who gave the church the right to quarry marble at Candoglia near Lake Maggiore and ship it along the canals. Master builders were called in from France and Germany, and records of their discussions with the Lombard builders about the height and proportions of the vaults survive. The church grew slowly over the centuries. The façade was completed only on Napoleon’s orders in the early 19th century, and the last door was inaugurated in 1965.
The church has five aisles and a broad transept. The nave is about 45 metres high and is carried by huge piers whose capitals contain statues in niches. Outside, the building is covered with spires, statues and pinnacles, and the roof can be visited. On the highest spire, 108 metres up, stands the gilded statue of Mary, the Madonnina, from 1774. The façade mixes Gothic spires with windows and portals in Renaissance and Baroque styles, a trace of the long building period.
The cathedral is still managed by the Veneranda Fabbrica, the organisation founded in 1387 to direct the building work. The white marble gets dirty and weathers, and repairs are constant; that is why it has become a saying in Milan that something is lungo come la fabbrica del Duomo, as long as the building of the cathedral. The church is one of the few examples of Gothic on such a scale in Italy, where the style otherwise took a more restrained form. It also shows how a building can carry the traces of five centuries of taste.