Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco

The Sforza Castle, the great brick fortress of Milan's Renaissance dukes, now holds a cluster of city museums, and its picture gallery is one of them. The Pinacoteca gathers paintings the city acquired over the centuries into a run of quiet, well-lit rooms inside the old ramparts.

The walls hold Lombard and Venetian work of real weight, Andrea Mantegna's Trivulzio Madonna, a Giovanni Bellini, a Correggio, and a tender Madonna by Filippo Lippi. Elsewhere in the same castle stands Michelangelo's Rondanini Pietà, the rough, unfinished figure of Christ and his mother that he was still cutting in the last days of his life. In another room Leonardo painted the ceiling as a canopy of interwoven mulberry trees, faded now but still traceable overhead.