Celtic Mediolanum still runs Italy’s fashion ledger
Milan, Lombardy’s capital, is Italy’s second city and a global node of industry, finance, and fashion. Celts founded it around 590 BC; Rome took it in 222 BC as Mediolanum, and from AD 284 to 402 it even served as an imperial capital of the West.
The Celtic name Medhelanon probably meant the settlement in the middle of the plain, or the place between watercourses, fitting a site laced by the Olona, Lambro and Seveso rivers; some scholars read the second part as a sacred enclosure, related to Welsh llan. About sixty Gallo-Roman places in France carried the same name, including Saintes and Évreux. A fanciful rival explanation, printed in Andrea Alciato's 1584 emblem book, derived it from a half-woolly sow, the city's old emblem.
In Livy's version, Bellovesus, nephew of the Gaulish ruler Ambicatus, led a band of tribes over the Alps and founded the town during the reign of Tarquinius Priscus. The settlers were Insubres of the Golasecca culture. At the core lay a wooded elliptical sanctuary near today's Piazza della Scala, about 443 by 323 metres, its axes aimed at the rising of Capella, linked to a spring festival on 24 March, and of Antares, around 11 November. The curving line of Corso Vittorio Emanuele, Piazza del Duomo and Via Broletto may still trace its southern edge.
Homes appeared about two centuries later near the present Royal Palace, followed by a temple to the goddess Belisama close to the cathedral site and a moated fort near Via Moneta. Later the wealthy Duchy of Milan helped drive the Renaissance, and resistance to Austrian rule fed Italian unification.
Today the city has about 1.36 million residents and a metro area of some 6.55 million, the fourth-largest in the European Union, producing around a fifth of Italy's GDP. It hosts Borsa Italiana, eight Fortune 500 Europe headquarters, Milan Fashion Week and the Furniture Fair, two great football clubs, and it staged world expositions in 1906 and 2015 and co-hosted the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Source: Milan
