Looking for Milan by Maxine Jones

It's hard to get an insight into Milan, because noone will admit to coming from there. The well-dressed people scurrying to business appointments clutching sleek mobile phones are all from out of town. “You can't live in Milan,” I am told again and again. “Milan is just a place to work.” It is also a place to shop, to admire fine works of art and, if you’re so inclined, dance at some of the best nightclubs in Europe. But the fact is you can't breathe in Milan. On an everyday level it is insupportable. A heavy cloud of pollution veils the city, shielding the surrounding Alps from view on all but a couple of days a year.

At the same time, Milan feels hard done by. It should be the capital of Italy, not Rome. It is the richest city in Italy, the most hard-working. “The difference between Milan and Rome,” ran a heading over a letter in Corriere della Sera: “I'd just like to know, as a matter of interest, why Rome's zoo remains open while Milan's zoo has been closed.” The same note of petulance is struck in the guide to Milan in my hotel bedroom: “Visitors to other destinations hurry through Milan... as if a city founded more than 2,000 years ago had nothing more to offer.” Well, I wasn't going to hurry through. I had come to stop and look.

And what did I find? First, the Duomo - the most vertiginously exhilarating cathedral experience I've ever had. From there it went downhill as my pores clogged with grime on the quest for monuments and galleries. But by the end of my visit I felt great respect for a place which sets so much store by fine art and high fashion, as if striving for a beauty lost to the city itself. My stay coincided with the final days of an art exhibition in The Palazzo Reale called L'Anima e il Volto (the soul and the face) depicting how the image of man has changed from Leonardo's heroic figures to Bacon's tortured and painful flesh - something to do with traffic jams, perhaps? The queue for this exhibition coiled round the cathedral square - not tourists, but Milanese hungry for culture. In the nearby Piazza della Scala, the famous opera house is booked out months in advance.

Despite being victims of the worst excesses of urban sophistication, the Milanese will shop at fresh vegetable, fish and meat shops on their way home from work, or enjoy country produce in one of the many friendly, cheap restaurants of the city. While lunch may be a quick affair so as not to interrupt business, culinary delectation has not been entirely sacrificed to the frenzy of money-making. Yet at the table next to me at breakfast a businesswoman laid out her laptop and phone and was logged on before she'd had her first mouthful of cornflakes.

But back to the start of my tour. Piazza del Duomo is pedestrianised, and would have offered a welcome break from the roar of traffic were it not for the roar of drills as pipes were being laid. The cathedral is staggering in its size and intricacy and by itself makes a trip to Milan worthwhile. The third largest church in the world after St Peter's in Rome and the Cathedral of Seville, it was begun in 1386 but took centuries more to complete. It is a mountain of marble shaped into statues (3,500 in all), pinnacles, buttresses, arches and pillars. Unsurprisingly, the marble, hewn from quarries near Lago Maggiore, is under attack from pollution. Climbing to the roof brings you into a silent, almost alpine world. No less than 135 white spires rise up around you, topped by the gold 'Madonnina', 108.50 metres high.

The next port of call is La Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, the 'salon' of Milan, entered through a huge triumphal arch. This glass and metal arcade is lined with elegant shops and cafes and tiled with mosaics. It has a high domed glass roof, from which its designer, Giuseppe Mengoni, fell to his death in 1865, a few days before the opening ceremony. The main branch of La Galleria leads into Piazza della Scala, where rose-tinged paving slabs are crossed by tram lines and La Scala, with its ochre tones, window boxes and brown-inked posters exerts a quiet magnetism.

What can't be missed in Milan is a trip round the Quadrilatero d'Oro, or golden square, of designer shops in via Monte Napoleone, via S. Andrea, via Spiga and via Borgospresso. Most of the shoppers are Japanese women, whose labelled carrier bags have little bows tied on the handles. Shops is not really the right name for such establishments - they are more temples to style. In the Gucci shop I was quoted 400 euro for a tiny yellow handbag. At the counter a woman in a fur coat continued her mobile phone conversation as she signed a credit card slip.

Taking the metro south to Porta Genova I walked along the canals, Naviglio Grande and Naviglio Pavese, supposedly a bohemian area of artesan shops and colourful barges. I saw no barges, there was no water in the canal and the shops were shuttered up. At night this is one of the main nightclub districts, thought in daytime their exteriors looked derelict and dismal.

Back on the sightseeing trail, I had one more church to tick off, S. Maria delle Grazie, on whose rectory wall Leonardo da Vinci painted the Last Supper. The method he used has not proved resistant to time, however, and the rectory was closed for restoration work. On the metro back to my hotel I wasn't disappointed. Milan isn't about visiting churches, it's about getting on with life and work. Here in the metro was the pulse of the city, and in the busy streets and shops above, where people were preparing for the night ahead.