Castello Sforzesco ★★

Milan's sprawling 15th century castle is home to excellent civic museums of tapestries, archaeological artifacts, paintings by Bellini and Mantegna, and sculptures from medieval to neoclassical—including Michelangelo's final sculpture, the Rondanini Pietà

Though it's been clumsily restored many times, most recently at the end of the 19th century, this fortresslike castle continues to evoke Milan's two most powerful medieval and Renaissance families, the Visconti and the Sforza.

The Visconti built the castle in the 14th century and the Sforza, who married into the Visconti clan and eclipsed them in power, reconstructed it in 1450.

The most influential residents were Ludovico "il Moro" Sforza and his wife Beatrice d'Este (of the famous Este family of Ferrara). After ill-advisedly calling the French into Italy at the end of the 15th century, Ludovico died in the dungeons of a château in the Loire valley—but not before the couple made the Castello and Milan one of Italy's great centers of the Renaissance. It was they who commissioned the works by Bramante and Leonardo da Vinci, and these splendors can be viewed on a stroll through the miles of salons that surround the Castello's enormous courtyard.

The museums of Castello Sforzesco

The salons house a series of small city-administered museums known collectively as the Civici Musei Castello Sforzesco. They include a pinacoteca with works by Bellini, Correggio and Magenta, and the extensive holdings of the Museo d'Arte Antica, filled with Egyptian funerary objects, prehistoric finds from Lombardy and the last work of 89-year-old Michelangelo, his unfinished Rondanini Pietà.

Michelangelo began his career with a Pietà carved at age 25, now in Rome's St. Peter's, and while the master was famous for not finishing his statues, on this one it was not his fault. At the age of 89, he was struck down (probably by a stroke) literally while chipping away at this sculpture.

According to his friends and colleagues, he had been working feverishly on it, and nothing else, in the weeks leading up to his death, abandoning an earlier design (from which remains a disembodied right arm) to embark on this elongated and strikingly modern-looking form.

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