Hangar Bicocca

To the north-east of the city centre is this stunning, multipurpose exhibition space of Hangar Bicocca, in a vast industrial site that once was the heart of the Pirelli company’s operations. Its smartly curated temporary shows are certainly worth a look, but the big, and we mean big, attraction is a permanent installation by German artist Anselm Kiefer. The seven concrete-and-lead towers of The Seven Heavenly Palaces are a teetering 15m tall, tucked under the dark blue canopy of the 7000-sq-metre space. The precarious, ruined shells invoke the mythical, mystical yearning of their title as well as the abject destruction of postwar Europe.