Museo del Novecento

Right on the Piazza del Duomo, facing the cathedral, the Museo del Novecento fills the Palazzo dell'Arengario with the art of the twentieth century. It opened in 2010, after architects rebuilt the interior around a spiral ramp that climbs through the galleries and nods to the Guggenheim. From the large windows beside that ramp, you catch the crowd and the traffic of the square below while the paintings wait upstairs.

The collection starts on the first floor with the Avant-Garde and Futurism, where Picasso, Braque and Kandinsky hang among the works that broke European art apart. Higher up, the second and third floors follow the century's other turns: Metaphysical painting, Abstraction, Informal Art, with Giorgio de Chirico and Lucio Fontana as anchors. Much of what you see comes from Milan's former civic collection of contemporary art, so the route reads as a record of how Italian art moved with the times, decade by decade.

The building rewards attention as much as the walls do. A suspended walkway carries you across to the Palazzo Reale next door, and the top floor opens onto a view of the Duomo that few museum visits can match: spire and gallery in one look. The whole space is wheelchair accessible, so the ramp that structures the art also carries everyone through it. If you go, save the upper floors for last, because that final window over the piazza is the sentence the museum ends on.