Sforza Castle: The Towers, Courtyards and Walls

The Castello Sforzesco is a square fortress of red brick and grey stone, about 180 metres a side, built by the Visconti in the 1360s and rebuilt by the Sforza after 1450. What stands today is also a restoration: much of it was put back between 1893 and 1905 by the architect Luca Beltrami. This page takes it part by part, in the order you meet it from Piazza Castello, and says what you can still see of each. For the guided way round, compare the Sforza Castle guided tours.

The Filarete Tower, rebuilt in 1905

The tall gate tower on the city side is the one on every postcard of Milan, and it is younger than it looks. Antonio Averulino, called Filarete, designed it in 1452. By the sixteenth century it was a gunpowder store, and in June 1521 it exploded. For almost four hundred years the castle had no gate tower at all.

Beltrami rebuilt it from documents, from a Leonardo-school painting known as the Madonna Lia and from a graffito at the Cascina Pozzobonelli. He first built a full-size wooden model, in 1895. The new tower opened on 24 September 1905, dedicated to King Umberto I. Look for the clock set in a radiant sun, the statue of Sant'Ambrogio by Luigi Secchi, and the painted arms of six Sforza dukes.

The round towers of Santo Spirito and del Carmine

The two great drums at the corners of the city front were built in 1452 by Bartolomeo Gadio, Francesco Sforza's engineer. They are faced in serizzo stone cut in a diamond-point pattern, which was meant to shrug off the new artillery of the day. Each holds six vaulted rooms, and both once held prisoners.

They were cut down in the sixteenth century and again during the uprising of 1848. Beltrami raised them back to height from French military drawings of 1800. The Carmine tower now houses the castle's art library.

The Torre di Bona and the Rocchetta

On 26 December 1476 Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza was stabbed to death in a conspiracy. His widow, Bona of Savoy, moved into the Rocchetta, the most defensible part of the castle, and from 1477 raised the tall square tower that still carries her name. It gave her a view over the whole fortress. It also held a prison cell with a spyhole in the door, which you can still see from the stairs.

The Rocchetta itself is a fortress within the fortress. Its outer walls have no windows; inside, three porticoed sides carry Visconti and Sforza arms on the capitals. Restoration between 2010 and 2013 brought back the painted suns and flames Beltrami added.

The Cortile delle Armi

Walk through the Filarete gate and the Cortile delle Armi opens up: the huge first courtyard, free from 7am to 7.30pm every day. Along the side towards the Carmine gate the castle keeps an open-air museum of lost Milan: late-Roman stone sarcophagi of the third and fourth centuries, and two Renaissance house fronts taken from Via Bassano Porrone and Via Spadari.

On the far side stands the Ospedale Spagnolo, the Spanish garrison's hospital, now the Pietà Rondanini museum. Near the way into the Corte Ducale is a white marble San Giovanni Nepomuceno of 1727, the one monument the Austrian garrison left behind.

The Corte Ducale and the Portico of the Elephant

The ducal residence is entered through a portico built by Benedetto Ferrini in 1473. It is called the Portico of the Elephant after the fresco still faintly visible on its wall; beside it are the traces of another animal, probably a lion. Galeazzo Maria lived here from 1468. His apartments ran over two floors, joined by a staircase of low, broad steps so that the duke could ride up to the upper rooms on horseback.

The ground-floor rooms are now the Museo d'Arte Antica, and several keep their painted vaults. What to see walks through them in order.

The Torre Castellana and the Torre Falconiera

Two square towers stand at the corners of the Rocchetta and the Corte Ducale. The Castellana, on the north-east, holds the Sala del Tesoro, where the Sforza kept their documents and valuables; Ludovico il Moro had Bramantino paint a giant Argus on its wall between 1489 and 1491 as a guardian. The Falconiera, opposite, holds Leonardo's Sala delle Asse, closed at present for restoration.

The battlements you can walk

The merlons along the walls are Beltrami's too, rebuilt from 1893 on the model of other Sforza castles in Lombardy. A stretch of the wall-walk is open as the Merlate Panoramiche: €10, Tuesday to Sunday, last entry at 5pm. Groups of up to 25 go up every twenty minutes with a warden, and a lift makes it step-free. Evening guided tours of the ramparts run on Thursdays and Saturdays at 7.30pm, from age eight.

The Ghirlanda and the covered way underground

The park side was once defended by an outer wall called the Ghirlanda, older than the Sforza and extended under Francesco Sforza between 1450 and 1466, with a moat fed by the Naviglio. Most of it was demolished from 1892. What survives is the covered way in the counterscarp: a brick passage with a vaulted ceiling 2.80 metres high and slit windows onto the moat, built so soldiers could move out unseen.

You can walk it only on a guided tour. The Tour dei Sotterranei runs on Saturdays and Sundays at 11am, for ages ten and up; bring a torch between two of you.

The castle in numbers

See the towers and the museums with a guide

Ninety minutes inside the castle, meeting under the Filarete Tower, with the museum ticket in the fare and the Pietà Rondanini on the route.

Check Availability