Milan
Milan is the regional capital of Lombardy, in northern Italy, and the seat of the Metropolitan City of Milan. It is the second-most populous city in Italy after Rome, with a population of 1.36 million in 2025. The city's wider metropolitan area is the largest in Italy, and the fourth-largest in the European Union, with an estimated population of 6.1 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 and made it the capital of the Western 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 and the headquarters of numerous national corporations, including eight Fortune 500 Europe companies., 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, appearing among the most visited cities in the world, ranking 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. The city also hosts numerous educational institutions, including academies and universities that account for 11% of the national total of enrolled students. Additionally, 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. The city is served by many luxury hotels and is the fifth most starred in the world by 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 Inter Milan, and one of Europe's main basketball teams, Olimpia Milano. Milan will host the Winter Olympic and Paralympic games for the first time in 2026, together with Cortina d'Ampezzo.
Toponymy
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 " in the midst of the plain", or of "place between watercourses", 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 and planus. However, some scholars believe that lanum comes from the Celtic root lan, meaning an enclosure or demarcated territory in which Celtic communities used to build shrines.
Hence Mediolanum could signify the central town or sanctuary of a Celtic tribe. Indeed, about sixty Gallo-Roman sites in France bore the name "Mediolanum", for example: Saintes and Évreux. In addition, another theory links the name to the scrofa semilanuta an ancient emblem of the city, fancifully accounted for in Andrea Alciato's Emblemata, 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.
History
Celtic era
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, 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 and 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.
Roman times
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" —"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 meant " 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.File:Ruins-imperial-complex-milan-.jpg|thumb|Ruins of the Emperor's palace in Milan located in Via Gorani. Here Constantine and Licinius issued the Edict of Milan.
File:Civico museo archeologico di Milano 1.jpg|thumb|Remains of the Roman walls of Milan located inside the Civic Archaeological Museum of Milan
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, 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 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 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 carried out attacks in Milan, with losses, according to Procopius, being about 300,000 men. The Lombards took Ticinum as their capital in 572, and left early-medieval Milan to the governance of its archbishops.