Sforza Castle and Michelangelo's Pietà Rondanini guided experience

Overview

Two hours inside Sforza Castle with a licensed guide, built around Michelangelo's last sculpture. Admission is included, headphones are provided once the group reaches eight, and the format stays small.

What to expect

You meet at the castle and go in with the guide, covering the courtyards and the fortress itself before reaching the room that holds the Pietà Rondanini. The commentary spends real time on the sculpture rather than passing it. Two hours covers the castle's history and one extraordinary object properly, which is the right trade.

He was working on it six days before he died

Michelangelo was eighty-eight when he died in 1564, and this was on his workbench at the end. It is unfinished in the most literal sense: the surfaces are still rough from the claw chisel, the faces barely emerge, and the two figures merge into a single vertical mass that looks nothing like the polished Pietà he carved as a young man. Sixty years separate the two, and he seems to have been unlearning everything he was famous for.

An arm from the earlier version is still attached

He had already carved a different composition from this block and then cut it down and started again, turning the stone and reworking the figures. The right arm of the first attempt survives, detached from the new body and hanging in space beside it. It is the clearest evidence anywhere of how he actually worked, and it exists only because he ran out of time to remove it.

Leonardo painted a ceiling here

One room in the castle was decorated by Leonardo in 1498 with interlaced mulberry trees whose branches knot together across the vault. It was whitewashed over for centuries and only rediscovered in 1893. Restoration work has been running for years, and what is visible varies, but the room is a reminder that both of the men who defined the Renaissance were employed by this court at the same time.

The tower blew up in 1521

The main gate tower stored gunpowder, and it exploded, taking most of the entrance front with it. What stands there now was rebuilt in 1905 from old drawings by an architect who had already spent years persuading the city not to demolish the whole castle as a symbol of foreign occupation.

Milan had already knocked it down once

In 1447 the citizens declared a republic and tore down the previous fortress on this site as an emblem of tyranny. Three years later they invited a new duke in, and he immediately rebuilt it, larger. The castle you are standing in is the second attempt, put up by the man the city chose after demolishing the first.

Practicalities

The courtyards are gravel and the museum rooms are level. Headphones are handed out once the group is large enough to need them. Cancellation is free up to a day ahead.