Milano Map

• Milan is a major nation-wide and international centre of the performing arts, most notably opera. Milan hosts La Scala operahouse, considered one of the most prestigious operahouses in the world, and throughout history has hosted the premieres of numerous operas, such as Nabucco by Giuseppe Verdi in 1842, La Gioconda by Amilcare Ponchielli, Madama Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini in 1904, Turandot by Giacomo Puccini in 1926, and more recently Teneke, by Fabio Vacchi in 2007. Other major theatres in Milan include the Teatro degli Arcimboldi, Teatro Dal Verme, Teatro Lirico (Milan) and formerly the Teatro Regio Ducal. The city also has a renownded symphony orchestra and musical conservatory, and has been, throughout history, a major centre for musical composition: numerous famous composers and musicians such as Gioseppe Caimo, Simon Boyleau, Hoste da Reggio, Verdi, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, Paolo Cherici and Alice Edun are or were from, or call or called Milan their home. The city has also formed numerous modern ensembles and bands, such as the Dynamis Ensemble, Stormy Six and the Camerata Mediolanense have been formed.

• Milan is one of Italy's Railway hubs, five major stations of Milan, amongst which the Milan Central station, are among Italy's busiest. The first railroad built in Milan, the Milan and Monza Rail Road was opened for service on August 17, 1840.

• Since December 16, 2009 two High speed train lines with trains running over 300 kmh (186 mph) link Milan to Bologna, Florence, Rome, Naples and Salerno in one direction, and to Turin in another. High Speed Rail connects Milan to Turin in 45m, Bologna in 1h, Florence in 1h 40m, Rome in 2h 55m, Naples in 4h and Salerno in 4h 25m.

• The Azienda Trasporti Milanesi (ATM) operates within the metropolitan area, managing a public transport network consisting of three metropolitan railway lines and tram, trolley-bus and bus lines. The ATM tramway fleet includes several Peter Witt cars, originally built in 1928 and still working. Overall the network covers nearly 1,400 km reaching 86 municipalities. Besides public transport, ATM manages the interchange parking lots and the on-street parking spaces in the historical centre and in the commercial zones using the SostaMilano parking card system.

• Milan Metro is the Rapid transit system serving the city with 3 lines and a total length of more than 80 km. One more line is under construction.

• The Suburban Railway Service Lines, composed of ten suburban lines connects the Milan agglomeration to the metropolitan area. More lines will be opening in late 2011.

• The Regional, Intercity, Eurostarcity and Eurocity Railway Services, link Milan with the rest of Lombardy, Italy's national railway system and Europe.

• The city tram network consists of approximately 160 kilometres (99 mi) of track and 17 lines. Bus lines cover over 1,070 km.

• Milan has a taxi service operated by private companies and licensed by the City of Milan (Comune di Milano). All taxis are the same color, white. Prices are based on a set fare at the beginning and an additional fare based on time elapsed and distance traveled. The number of licences is kept low by lobbying of present taxi drivers.

• The city of Milan is served by three international airports. The Malpensa International Airport, the second biggest airport in Italy, is about 45 km from central Milan and connected to downtown Cadorna FN Railway Station and Milan's Centrale FS Main Railway Station with the "Malpensa Express" railway service running every 15 minutes and with the Suburban S10 Line. Malpensa Airport handled 18,947,808 passengers in 2010. The Linate Airport, which is near the city limits, connected to downtown with the Bus Express Line X73 and Bus Line 73 and to Centrale FS Main Railway Station with ATM Shuttle Bus Services, is mainly used for domestic and short-haul international flights, with over 9 million passengers in 2010. The airport of Orio al Serio, near to the city of Bergamo, serves the low-cost traffic of Milan, with 7,160,008 passengers in 2009. It is connected with Shuttle Bus Services from Milan's Main Central Station.

• The most important parks in Milan are the set of adjacent parks in the western area of the city forming Parco Agricolo Sud Milano (Parco delle Cave, 131 hectares; Boscoincittà, 110 hectares; and Trenno Park, 59 hectares, whose total area amounts to about 300 hectares), Sempione Park, Parco Forlanini, Giardini Pubblici, Giardino della Villa Comunale, Giardini della Guastalla and Lambro Park. Sempione Park is a large public park, situated between the Castello Sforzesco and the Peace Arch, near Piazza Sempione. It was built by Emilio Alemagna, and contains a Napoleonic Arena, the Milan City Aquarium, a tower, an art exhibition centre, some ponds and a library. Then there is Parco Forlani, which, with a size of 235 hectares is the largest park in Milan, and contains a hill and a pond. Giardini Pubblici is among Milan's oldest remaining public parks, founded on 29 November 1783, and completed around 1790. It is landscaped in English style, containing a pond, a Natural History Museum of Milan and the Neoclassical Villa Reale. Giardini della Guastalla is also one of the oldest gardens in Milan, and consists mainly of a decorated fish pond.

• Milan also hosts three important botanical gardens: the Milan University Experimental Botanical Garden (a small botanical garden operated by the Istituto di Scienze Botaniche), the Brera Botanical Garden (another botanical garden, founded in 1774 by Fulgenzio Witman, an abbot under the orders of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, and restored in 1998 after several years of abandonment) and the Cascina Rosa Botanical Garden. On January 23, 2003 a Garden of the Righteous was established in Monte Stella to commemorate those who opposed genocides and crimes against humankind. It hosts trees dedicated to Moshe Bejski, Andrei Sakharov, the founders of the Gardens of the Righteous in Yerevan and Sarajevo Svetlana Broz and Pietro Kuciukian, and others. The decision to commemorate a "Righteous" person in this Garden is made every year by a commission of high-profile characters.

• The city of Milan is subdivided into administrative zones, called Zonas. Before 1999, the city had 20 Zone; in 1999 the administration decided to reduce the number of these zones from 20 to 9. Today, the Zona 1 is in the "historic centre", the zone within the perimeter of the Spanish-era city walls; the other eight cover the areas from the Zona 1 borders to the city limits. So a zone is very big (considering inhabitants' number), comparable to many Italian city or even a half or third of some Italian province (provincia). Nevertheless a zone's government and zone representatives in Milan have very little power and very few duties.

• In the late 18th century, and throughout the 19th, Milan was an important centre for intellectual discussion and literary creativity. The Enlightenment found here a fertile ground. Cesare, Marquis of Beccaria, with his famous Dei delitti e delle pene, and Count Pietro Verri, with the periodical Il Caffè were able to exert a considerable influence over the new middle-class culture, thanks also to an open-minded Austrian administration. In the first years of the 19th century, the ideals of the Romantic movement made their impact on the cultural life of the city and its major writers debated the primacy of Classical versus Romantic poetry. Here, too, Giuseppe Parini, and Ugo Foscolo published their most important works, and were admired by younger poets as masters of ethics, as well as of literary craftsmanship. Foscolo's poem Dei sepolcri was inspired by a Napoleonic law which—against the will of many of its inhabitants—was being extended to the city. n the third decade of the 19th century, Alessandro Manzoni wrote his novel I Promessi Sposi, considered the manifesto of Italian Romanticism, which found in Milan its centre, and Carlo Porta wrote his poems in Western Lombard Language. The periodical Il Conciliatore published articles by Silvio Pellico, Giovanni Berchet, Ludovico di Breme, who were both Romantic in poetry and patriotic in politics. After the Unification of Italy in 1861, Milan lost its political importance; nevertheless it retained a sort of central position in cultural debates. New ideas and movements from other countries of Europe were accepted and discussed: thus Realism and Naturalism gave birth to an Italian movement, Verismo. The greatest verista novelist, Giovanni Verga, was born in Sicily but wrote his most important books in Milan.

• In addition to Italian, approximately a third of the population of western Lombardy can speak the Western Lombard language, also known as Insubric. In Milan, some people (mostly elder ones) of the city (natives but also, less often, immigrants) can speak the traditional Milanese language —that is to say the urban variety of Western Lombard, which is not to be confused with the Milanese-influenced regional variety of the Italian language.