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Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea
While most downtown galleries bank on international blue-chip artists, this plucky upstart still gambles on emerging Italian artists - and when it works, the payoff is that much greater (and the prices are better, too). Recent finds include Andrea Mastrovito's delicately outrageous Dracula-meets-Batman watercolours, and Luiggi Presicce's ghoulish toys.
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Artemide
Aesthetically inclined genies everywhere would like to announce that they're done with the whole brass oil-lamp schtick, and would appreciate if you'd rub on an Artemide next time you want a wish granted. Giancarlo Matteoli's 1965 blue mushroom-shaped Nesso table lamp would be ideal, and the Dalú transparent orange plastic study light shaped like hoodie sweatshirt would suit a smallish sprite.
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Bisazza
The first and last name in modern mosaics has opened a Milan showroom where tiny tesserae get together and stage riots of colour and pattern, then mysteriously cohere into a fluttering kelp forest, or luminous jellyfish trailing tentacles like royal trains.
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Casa Museo Boschi di Stefano
The next best thing to inheriting a wealthy, eccentric Milanese great-grandmother's art collection is visiting this charming flat packed with 300 paintings by 20th-century greats. See Paula Moderson-Becker's Expressionist girl sneaking sidelong glances, Umberto Boccini's dynamic brushstrokes propelling painting towards Futurism, Mario Sironi's brooding, fragmented post-war landscapes and Lucio Fontana's provocative slashed paintings.
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Da Driade
Frescoed rooms present the ultimate design challenge - with all those cherubs flying around, suddenly that mod houndstooth sofa seems a bit much - but Da Driade rises to the occasion in its own converted neoclassical palazzo showroom with impeccable eclecticism, unconventional materials and top international designers.
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Flos
So this is what they mean by seeing things in a different light. The showroom floor here is surreal, with rice-paper lanterns that look like sea urchins, a desk lamp shaped like a chrome horn, and a floor lamp with a gold AK47 for a base that sheds a provocative light on any subject.
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Fondazione Prada
Big enough for a B52 or, say, a full-scale killer whale made of scavenged pieces of white foamcore by Tom Sachs, the Fondazione Prada produces two grand-scale, original solo shows each year. The Sachs show captured our touchy times with fragile giants dangerously near blunt tools, and a live-in control tower for a paranoiac complete with weather monitors, radar, guns, cigarettes and vodka.
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Galleria Cardi & Co
One of Milan's best-kept secrets is on a quiet street, through the courtyard and past garage doors: a polished concrete box often filled by Italy's most polished conceptual artists. Pier Paolo Calzolari recently showed lead and copper books slowly leaking saltwater onto white tablecloths, like fountains of knowledge reduced to tears.
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Galleria Corsoveneziaotto
Facelifts are unnecessary in Milan, because this gallery keeps eyebrows permanently up with sensations like Wim Delvoye's recent showcase of Milan's favourite media: pork. One whiff of his exquisite inlaid floor reveals that it was made entirely of Milanese salami, and taxidermied pigs tattooed with Louis Vuitton logos seem tailor-made to scandalise fashion-conscious Milan.
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Galleria d'Arte Moderna
Rush past the watchful eyes of Milanese neoclassical portraits and anatomically correct miniatures, upstairs past medieval Madonnas and lonesome Buddhas, and emerge facing Volpedo's pointillist marching workers in The Fourth Estate . From here, leapfrog the French Impressionists to Giacomo Balla's Futurist masterworks and Medardo Rosso's creepy, cackling wax children from the Palazzo Reale's 20th-century collection.
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Galleria Milano
There is no beauty without risk, as this modern gallery in a historic palazzo has proved for decades. The vaulted ceiling of the grand salon was recently repainted with what looked like heraldic patterns from afar, but on closer inspection turned out to be thousands of mosquitoes hand-drawn by contemporary artist Vincenzo Agnetti.
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Kartell
Plastic hasn't got this much word of mouth since The Graduate . Philippe Starck brought Lucite and French baroque together at last in a clear plastic Ghost Chair perfect for post-revolutionary nobility experiencing cash-flow issues, while Missoni's starburst fabrics add more instant pop to plastic chair seats than a mislaid thumbtack.
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Moroso
You half expect to glimpse Van Gogh shooting pool in the corner of this vibrant green and red gallery, with its curvaceous lipstick-coloured Ron Arad armchairs, verdant Venus flytrap chair, and a couch spontaneously combusting into a swirling, unstable floral pattern of red, brown and turquoise.
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Museo Bagatti Valsecchi
Though born a few centuries too late, the Bagatti Valsecchi brothers were determined to be Renaissance men, and from 1878 to 1887 built their home as a living museum of the quattrocento . The dauntless interior decorators accepted no cheap reproductions, and collected authentic and painstakingly restored period pieces - hence the throne-like chairs and bathroom crucifixion triptych.
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Museo Civico di Storia Naturale
Only one word revives kids bored of shopping and sightseeing: dinosaurs! Seven of them are downstairs here at Italy's oldest museum, along with dino eggs, fossils and gems. Upstairs, old-fashioned zoology dioramas showcase eerily lifelike taxidermied critters, along with the latest insights about conservation and endangered species.
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Museo Diocesano
Don't be taken in by the false modesty of these tranquil white 16th-century cloisters: Milan's archdiocese has quite a collection, and knows how to put on a show. A recent exhibit spotlighted Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna, whose views of Jesus on the cross from the feet up established him as the reigning champion of extreme perspective.
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Museo Inter e Milan
Cartoonish papier-mâché dummies of 24 football stars add a little light humour to this shrine of testosterone, boasting nonstop match videos and trophies galore. The accompanying stadium tour covers the locker room, where you can rest your bum on the same bench as countless naked football legends. Before any stalkerish ideas come to mind: on game day, the museum closes 30mins before kickoff, and tours end early.
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Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica
Kids of every age ooh and ahh over the latest, greatest inventions from Leonardo da Vinci to today. Downstairs are spooky medieval forges, upstairs are robotics and models testing Leonardo's outlandish designs - those starched wings don't fly, but that anteater-shaped copper cooling device works. Out back is a train station full of steam engines and a 1940s submarine you can tour, if you book ahead.
Read more about Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica
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Museo Poldi-Pezzoli
This aesthetic treasure-trove, amassed by the incredibly wealthy Giacomo Poldi-Pezzoli in 1881, is filled with collections of jewellery, porcelain, sundials, tapestries, ancient armaments, period furniture and paintings. Botticelli's masterpiece, Madonna and Child , is alone worth the visit.
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Museo Teatrale alla Scala
'Untutored hands may not touch me', are the words of a true diva, inscribed here on an 18th-century spinette (piano). Harlequino costumes and playing cards left at La Scala also hint at centuries of Milanese musical drama. Portraits show Rossini chatting up patrons, while Verdi seems troubled by mixed reviews, and Callas a goddess towering above critique.
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Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea
Cutting-edge art shows seem right at home in this cutting-edge city. Even a 1993 Mafia-related bombing couldn't daunt the gutsy PAC, which arose from the ashes in true Milanese fashion to mount ever more daring shows. Expect to see large, experimental works in new media.
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Palazzo della Ragione
Founded in 1228 to handle deals brokered and broken in this merchants' piazza, this elegant colonnaded hall of justice bears Milan's bristled boar insignia in terracotta. Empress Maria Theresa added a layer of bricks and bureaucracy with an archive of officially notarised papers, which piled up until 1961. Now the Palazzo hosts temporary exhibitions that don't mind being upstaged by their surroundings.
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Photology
Tear yourself away from the gorgeous photography catalogues in the storefront bookstore and check out the gallery out back in the garden shed, where those X Portfolio fetish shots that got Robert Mappelthorpe censored in the US recently shared wall space with bored nudes in mod wigs by Andy Warhol and Carlo Mollino.
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Spazio Oberdan
Art-house cinema downstairs, art gallery upstairs: Spazio Oberdan is artistically ambidextrous, with video art to bridge the two. Ambitious programs include Ecce Uomo , a show of blockbuster artists feeling Jesus' pain, from Damien Hirst's wry Dead Ends - a medicine cabinet full of cigarette butts smoked religiously - to William Kentridge's animated waves of grief in Tide Table .
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Studio Museo Castiglioni
Discover where great Italian designs come from at the studio of the Castiglioni brothers, whose historic designs range from the streetlight-turned-pendulum Arco floor lamp for Flos to cheeky downward-spiralling Alessi ashtrays. See prototypes from its 1960s-80s heyday and the objects that inspired them, including bicycle seats and toys made of Iranian beer cans.
