Pinacoteca di Brera Milan: Which Ticket, Booking and Which Rooms First

The Pinacoteca di Brera sells one ticket online, Grande Brera, and there is no cheaper entry waiting for you at the door. It covers the gallery and Palazzo Citterio, and because booking is compulsory, the visit begins with a reservation page well before you reach Via Brera. Plan two to three hours and a fixed order of rooms. The museum then stays easy to handle.

Which Brera ticket to buy: one price and compulsory booking

Buy Grande Brera for €20 on Brera Booking, the gallery's own reservation site at brerabooking.org, and pick the day and the time slot there. Some guides mention a gallery-only ticket at a lower price, but the official site sells only Grande Brera, so the official site settles the question. Palazzo Citterio comes with it and stays valid on the same day and the six days after, which means you can see it later in the week. Nobody has to.

Tickets are also sold at the Pinacoteca ticket office, but booking saves roughly 10 to 30 minutes at the till, and the early slots and weekend afternoons can sell out. So the verdict is to book online and take the first morning slot. If your plans are loose, choose a weekday, because the free first Sunday and the weekend afternoons are the days that fill up first. The audio guide is an extra, and it comes in Italian, English, French and Spanish. Groups of up to 23 people plus a guide enter every 30 minutes, which is worth knowing if a coach party is ahead of you.

Booking is compulsory for the Grande Brera ticket. Tickets are also sold at the Pinacoteca ticket office; for a chosen day and time use Brera Booking.

When to go and how to get there

Go when the doors open, because the rooms are quiet and you can stand in front of a big canvas without a shoulder in your view. On the first Sunday of the month the free entry draws a crowd, and the galleries fill up by 11 o'clock, so that day belongs to the early slot or to another day altogether. Closed days: Monday, 1 May, 1 January and 25 December. Opening hours: Tue–Sun 8:30 am–7:15 pm, last entry 6 pm.

The entrance is at Via Brera 28, in the narrow streets north of the Duomo. Castello Sforzesco is about 12 minutes away on foot, so the two fit into one stretch of the day. The Last Supper at Santa Maria delle Grazie is about 15 minutes on foot or ten minutes by metro line M2, which helps if you have booked it for the same afternoon.

Getting aroundLine M2 runs toward the Last Supper, and the page on getting around explains the transport tickets: €2.20 and €7.60.Getting around Milan →

The rooms in order: Raphael, Mantegna, Caravaggio

Start with the first big room, where Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin hangs next to Piero della Francesca's Brera Madonna, and give them the time you would give a headline. Mantegna's Dead Christ comes next. It is painted from the feet and so sharply shortened that the figure seems to lie in front of you. Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus waits in a side room near the end of the route, and it rewards the visitor who still has some attention left by then. Walking in this order keeps the Renaissance together, then Caravaggio, then Venice, so you reach each room with fresh eyes.

After Caravaggio come Bellini's Madonnas, then the Venetian rooms with Titian and Veronese, which are the place to slow down if you like colour. The Jesi collection on the second floor, with Morandi, Modigliani and Boccioni, is often calm and makes a good last stop. Palazzo Citterio is a detour only if twentieth-century art interests you. Skip it without regret if it does not.

When you only have 90 minutes

Brera is not the Uffizi, and two to three hours in the rooms is a normal visit, not a day's work. With 90 minutes the trick is to give up whole rooms instead of rushing through all of them. Decide before you enter which paintings you will not leave without, and give most of the time to those three. The rest of the 90 minutes goes on walking between rooms and one bench.

• Go straight to Raphael and Piero della Francesca in the first big room.
• Walk on to Mantegna's Dead Christ and stay long enough to see the perspective.
• Finish with Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus in the side room.
• Leave out the Venetian rooms and the Jesi collection, and keep them for a longer visit.

1 dayBrera suits the afternoon, and the Milan itinerary shows how to place it after the Duomo and the Galleria in the same day.Milan in 1 day →