Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II

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In the central octagon of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, four mosaic medallions mark the coats of arms of the Kingdom of Italy's capitals — Turin, Florence, Rome, and Milan itself. Turin's medallion includes a charging bull, and for well over a century, Milanese tradition has held that spinning three times on one heel pressed into the bull's testicles brings good luck. The ritual has been performed so relentlessly that the marble has worn through entirely, leaving a shallow crater where the genitals once were. The city repaired it. The spinning continued. The hole came back.

Giuseppe Mengoni designed the Galleria in 1861, and construction ran from 1865 to 1877 — twelve years of ironwork, glass, and ambition on a scale that outpaced every covered arcade before it. The ironwork came from the Atelier Henry Joret in France; the glass plates from Saint-Gobain. The four barrel vaults, each roughly 47 feet wide and 28 feet tall, converge at a dome stretching nearly 123 feet across. Critics Pevsner and Hitchcock later acknowledged the roof as a benchmark of 19th-century iron-and-glass construction. Mengoni himself did not survive to see the inauguration — he fell from the scaffolding just days before the opening ceremony in 1877.

The Galleria was bombed heavily during World War II and has been repaired and conserved multiple times since. A major cleaning ahead of Expo Milano 2015 used a moving crane scaffold to reach the facades, mosaics, and statues without a single fixed support touching the floor below. The result is a space that reads as both ancient and implausibly light — a glass cathedral that somehow doubled as a shortcut between the Duomo and La Scala.