Walking Milan out from the Duomo

FOG covers the entire world in fog and gives you exactly one tool for removing it. In Milan the shape of what you clear is decided before you start, because the city is built as rings around a single point.

Rings and spokes, and no hills at all

Milan grew outward from the Duomo in circles. The innermost is the cerchia dei Navigli, the line of the old canals, now a ring of streets. Outside that sits the cerchia dei Bastioni, following the Spanish walls, and outside that the circonvallazione. Long straight roads run out from the centre and cross those rings like spokes.

The whole thing is on the Po plain, which is to say completely flat. There is no hill anywhere in the city and no terrain to slow you down or shape your route. What shapes your route instead is geometry. Walk a spoke and you get a straight line out. Walk a ring and you get a long arc that never quite closes unless you commit a whole afternoon to it.

The old core is small enough to be genuinely finishable, which is not something you can say about most large cities.

A walk through the middle

Start in Piazza del Duomo, go through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II and out the far side into Piazza della Scala. From there head north into Brera, where the streets get narrow and irregular and stop obeying the grid, which makes it the densest fog clearing in the city per step.

Come out of Brera onto Via Pontaccio, then west to the Castello Sforzesco. Walk through the castle courtyards into Parco Sempione and out the other end to the Arco della Pace. That is about four kilometres and it takes in the cathedral, the tightest medieval streets in Milan, the castle and the biggest park in the centre.

The other essential walk is the Navigli. Follow the Naviglio Grande southwest from the Darsena along the towpath, with the water on one side and low buildings on the other. It is a straight line, so it reads on the map as a clean spoke shooting out of the ring.

Where the fog comes off fastest

Inside the cerchia dei Navigli the streets are short, crooked and packed together, and the city percent moves noticeably after a single good walk. Brera, the area around Sant Ambrogio and the lanes behind Via Torino all fill in quickly.

Once you cross the Bastioni it changes. The nineteenth and twentieth century districts have longer blocks and wider streets, and progress slows. Corso Buenos Aires is a good example, over a kilometre of shopfronts in a straight line that clears one thin strip and nothing else. Isola and Porta Nuova are compact enough to be worth a loop. The outer belt around the circonvallazione is a serious walk in its own right.

Around the Porta Nuova towers, the tall cluster near Piazza Gae Aulenti, a phone location can wander a little. Everywhere else in Milan the buildings are low enough that it is a non issue.

Season, surface and timing

Milan has real winter fog, the thick kind that sits on the plain in December and January, and it is cold and damp rather than dramatic. Summer is the opposite problem, hot and humid and airless, and in August a lot of the city closes and leaves. Spring and autumn are the good months.

Underfoot you get cobbles, granite tram tracks and porphyry setts, which are handsome and hard on the feet over a long day. The trams themselves are useful for getting back to the centre when you have walked a spoke to its end.

FOG keeps recording with the app closed and the screen off, so you can leave the phone in a pocket. There is no account, no cloud and no tracking, and the map stays on your device.

Questions people actually ask

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