Galleria Vittorio Emanuele IIHistory & audio guide · Milan

You step in… and you're not quite on a street, nor quite inside a building. You're in something in between, designed to let the city be lived differently. The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II went up between 1865 and 1877, when Italy had just unified and Milan needed to show itself to the world: iron, glass and a dome some 36 metres high linking the Duomo to La Scala. Religion, politics and culture, joined in a single passage.

It was designed by Giuseppe Mengoni, who fell to his death from the works days before the opening, never seeing it finished. Then came war and rebuilding: the roof was destroyed in the 1943 bombings, and its shine had to be restored more than once.

But the Galleria is more than architecture. It's one of the first great modern shopping arcades —the "drawing room of Milan"—, where Campari was born and historic cafés like the Camparino still open their doors. Look up at the four-continent lunettes, read the coats of arms set into the floor and, if you like, spin on Turin's bull to see whether luck shows up. Four chapters on how Milan invented a way of inhabiting the city.