About the neighborhood
Historical affiliations
Celtic tribe belonging to the Insubres group 590–222 BC
Roman Republic 222–27 BC
Roman Empire 27 BC–AD 395
Western Roman Empire 395–476
Kingdom of Italy 476–493
Ostrogothic Kingdom 493–553
Eastern Roman Empire 553–569
Lombard Kingdom 569–774
Carolingian Empire 774–781
Regnum Italiae 781–1014
Holy Roman Empire 1014–1114
Free Commune 1114–1259
Lordship of Milan 1259–1395
Duchy of Milan 1395–1447
Golden Ambrosian Republic 1447–1450
Duchy of Milan 1450–1796
Transpadane Republic 1796-1797
Cisalpine Republic 1797–1802
Italian Republic 1802–1805
Kingdom of Italy 1805–1814
Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia 1815–1859
Kingdom of Sardinia 1859–1861
Kingdom of Italy 1861–1943
Italian Social Republic 1943–1945
Kingdom of Italy 1945–1946
Italian Republic 1946–present
Milan is an ancient city in northern Italy first settled under the name Medhelanon in about 590 BC by a Celtic tribe belonging to the Insubres group and belonging to the Golasecca culture. It was conquered by the ancient Romans in 222 BC, who latinized the name of the city into Mediolanum. The city's role as a major political centre dates back to the late antiquity, when it served as the capital of the Western Roman Empire.
From the 12th century until the 16th century, Milan was one of the largest European cities and a major trade and commercial centre, as the capital of the Duchy of Milan, one of the greatest political, artistic and fashion forces in the Renaissance. Having become one of the main centres of the Italian Enlightenment during the early modern period, it then became one of the most active centres during the Restoration, until its entry into the unified Kingdom of Italy. From the 20th century onwards Milan became the industrial and financial capital of Italy, one of the economic capitals of Europe and a global financial centre.
Toponymy
Milan was founded with the Celtic name of Medhelanon, later latinized by the ancient Romans into Mediolanum. In Celtic language medhe- meant "middle, centre" and the name element -lanon is the Celtic equivalent of Latin -planum "plain", meant "(settlement) in the midst of the plain", or of "place between watercourses" (Celtic medhe = "in the middle, central"; land or lan = "land"), given the presence of the Olona, Lambro, Seveso rivers and the Nirone and Pudiga streams.
The dh sound, which has disappeared from the modern Milanese dialect, was instead present in the ancient local idiom once spoken in Milan. It is found, among others, as well as in Medhelanon, in the ancient Milanese words doradha ("golden"), crudho ("abrupt person"), mudha ("change") and ornadha ("ornate"). In Milanese dialect, the oldest name of which documented traces have been found is Miran.
The Latin name Mediolanum comes from the Latin words medio (in the middle) and planus (plain). However, some scholars believe that lanum comes from the Celtic root lan, meaning an enclosure or demarcated territory (source of the Welsh word llan, meaning "a sanctuary or church", ultimately cognate to English/German Land) in which Celtic communities used to build shrines.
Hence Mediolanum could signify the central town or sanctuary of a Celtic tribe. Indeed, about sixty Gallo-Roman sites in France bore the name "Mediolanum", for example: Saintes (Mediolanum Santonum) and Évreux (Mediolanum Aulercorum). In addition, another theory links the name to the scrofa semilanuta ("half-woolly sow") an ancient emblem of the city, fancifully accounted for in Andrea Alciato's Emblemata (1584), beneath a woodcut of the first raising of the city walls, where a boar is seen lifted from the excavation, and the etymology of Mediolanum given as "half-wool", explained in Latin and in French.
According to this theory, the foundation of Milan is credited to two Celtic peoples, the Bituriges and the Aedui, having as their emblems a ram and a boar; therefore "The city's symbol is a wool-bearing boar, an animal of double form, here with sharp bristles, there with sleek wool." Alciato credits Ambrose for his account.
Place of foundation
Three hypotheses are considered regarding the location choice of the territory of Milan, which are based on the etymology of the name Medhelanon and on the archaeological investigations carried out in modern times on the Milanese territory:
the choice of place may have been dictated by the presence of the "line of springs" where there is a meeting, underground, between geological layers with different permeability, a type of terrain that allows deep waters to spontaneously resurface on the surface. This could mean that Medhelanon was born on a spit of land that originally overlooked a swamp, and therefore in a well-defensible place;
the presence of five watercourses in its surroundings may have been decisive: the Seveso and the Lambro to the east, and the Pudiga, the Nirone and the Olona to the west.
finally, Medhelanon may have been founded near an important and pre-existing Celtic sanctuary which was located near the modern Piazza della Scala.
Celtic era
Around 590 BC a Celtic tribe belonging to the Insubres group and belonging to the Golasecca culture settled the city under the name Medhelanon. According to Titus Livy's comments, the city was founded around 600 B.C. by Belloveso, chief of the Insubres. Legend has it that Belloveso found a mythological animal known as the scrofa semilanuta (in Italian: "half-wooly boar") which became the ancient emblem of the city of Milan (from semi-lanuta or medio-lanum). Several ancient sources (including Sidonius Apollinaris, Datius, and, more recently, Andrea Alciato) have argued that the scrofa semilanuta is connected to the etymology of the ancient name of Milan, "Mediolanum", and this is still occasionally mentioned in modern sources, although this interpretation has long been dismissed by scholars. Nonetheless, wool production became a key industry in this area, as recorded during the early Middle Ages.
Medhelanon, in particular, was developed around a sanctuary, which was the oldest area of the village. The sanctuary, which consisted of a wooded area in the shape of an ellipse with a central clearing, was aligned according to precise astronomical points. For this reason, it was used for religious gatherings, especially in particular celebratory moments. The sanctuary of Medhelanon was an ellipse with axes of 443m (1,453ft) and 323m (1,060ft) located near Piazza della Scala. The urban planning profile was based on these early paths, and on the shape of the sanctuary, reached, in some cases, up to the 19th century and even beyond. For example, the route of the modern Corso Vittorio Emanuele, Piazza del Duomo, Piazza Cordusio and Via Broletto, which is curvilinear, could correspond to the south side of the ellipse of the ancient sanctuary of Medhelanon.
The Celtic sanctuaries, and that of Medhelanon was not an exception, were equipped with a moat, which had the purpose of sacredly defining the urban space, distinguishing the "inside" and the "outside", and at the same time had to protect it from the flowing waters in the territory. One axis of the Medhelanon sanctuary was aligned towards the heliacal rising of Antares, while the other towards the heliacal rising of Capella. The latter coincided with a Celtic spring festival celebrated on 24 March, while the heliacal rising of Antares corresponded with 11 November, which opened and closed the Celtic year and which coincided with the point where the Sun rose on the winter solstice. About two centuries after the creation of the Celtic sanctuary, the first residential settlements began to be built around it. Medhelanon then transformed from a simple religious center to an urban and then military centre, thus becoming a real village.
The first homes were built just south of the Celtic sanctuary, near the modern Royal Palace of Milan. Subsequently, with the growth of the town centre, other important buildings for the Medhelanon community were built. First, a temple dedicated to the goddess Belisama was built, which was located near the modern Milan Cathedral. Then, near the modern Via Moneta, which is located near today's Piazza San Sepolcro, a fortified building with military functions was built which was surrounded by a defensive moat.
At the current Biblioteca Ambrosiana, in Piazza San Sepolcro, archaeological excavations have revealed the presence, under the stone floor dating back to the 1st century AD. of the Roman forum of Milan, of a neighborhood of wooden houses dating back to the Celtic settlement of the 5th century BC. Other important findings attributable to the Celtic era were found along the south-west side of the Royal Palace, where, five meters below the modern road surface, remains of houses and a furnace were discovered which date back to a period between 5th and 4th centuries BC.
Among the remains of the Basilica of Santa Tecla, which are located under the Milen Cathedral, there is what remains of a square-based building with a side of 17m (56ft) perhaps associated with the temple dedicated to Belisama, or with a subsequent Roman temple dedicated to Minerva. The moat of the fortified military building, which dated back to the 4th century BC, was found in Via Moneta.
Roman times
During the Roman Republic, the Romans, led by consul Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio Calvus, fought the Insubres and captured the settlement in 222 BC. The chief of the Insubres then submitted to Rome, giving the Romans control of the settlement. The Romans eventually conquered the entirety of the region, calling the new province "Cisalpine Gaul" (Latin: Gallia Cisalpina)—"Gaul this side of the Alps"—and may have given the city its Latinized name of Mediolanum: in Gaulish *medio- meant "middle, centre" and the name element -lanon is the Celtic equivalent of Latin -planum "plain", thus *Mediolanon (Latinized as Mediolānum) meant "(settlement) in the midst of the plain". Mediolanum became the most important center of Cisalpine Gaul and, in the wake of economic development, in 49 BC, was elevated, within the Lex Roscia, to the status of municipium.
The ancient Celtic settlement was, from a topographic point of view, superimposed and replaced by the Roman one. The Roman city was then gradually superimposed and replaced by the medieval one. The urban center of Milan has therefore grown constantly and rapidly, until modern times, around the first Celtic nucleus. The original Celtic toponym Medhelanon then changed, as evidenced by a graffiti in Celtic language present on a section of the Roman walls of Milan which dates back to a period following the Roman conquest of the Celtic village, in Mesiolano. Mediolanum was important for its location as a hub in the road network of northern Italy. Polybius describes the country as abounding in wine, and every kind of grain, and in fine wool. Herds of swine, both for public and private supply, were bred in its forests, and the people were well known for their generosity.
During the Augustan age Mediolanum was famous for its schools; it possessed a theatre and an amphitheatre (129.5 X 109.3 m), the third largest in Roman Italy after the Colosseum in Rome and the vast amphitheatre in Capua. A large stone wall encircled the city in Caesar's time, and later was expanded in the late third century AD, by Maximian. Mediolanum was made the seat of the prefect of Liguria (Praefectus Liguriae) by Hadrian, and Constantine made it the seat of the vicar of Italy (Vicarius Italiae). In the third century Mediolanum possessed a mint, a horreum and imperial mausoleum. In 259, Roman legions under the command of Emperor Gallienus soundly defeated the Alemanni in the Battle of Mediolanum. In 286, the Roman Emperor Diocletian moved the capital of the Western Roman Empire from Rome to Mediolanum. Diocletian himself chose to reside at Nicomedia in the Eastern Empire, leaving his colleague Maximian at Milan.
Maximian built several gigantic monuments: the large circus (470 × 85 metres), the thermae or Baths of Hercules, a large complex of imperial palaces and other services and buildings of which few visible traces remain. Maximian increased the city area to 375 acres by surrounding it with a new, larger stone wall (about 4.5km long) with many 24-sided towers. The monumental area had twin towers; the one included later in the construction of the convent of San Maurizio Maggiore remains 16.6 m high.
In Mediolanum there was no need for aqueducts, given that the water was abundant and easily accessible: it emerged from the ground from springs and flowed nearby in rivers and streams, and this fully responded to the needs of the city's daily life. Given that over the centuries Mediolanum had grown and needed new water for the most varied uses (for artisans as well as for public, domestic and defensive uses) the ancient Romans the Seveso river, the Nirone river and the Olona river, which flowed just outside the town centre, towards the city, flowing into the moat of the Roman walls of Mediolanum.
It was from Mediolanum that the Emperor Constantine issued what is now known as the Edict of Milan in AD 313, granting tolerance to all religions within the Empire, thus paving the way for Christianity to become the dominant religion of the Empire. Constantine was in Mediolanum to celebrate the wedding of his sister to the Eastern Emperor, Licinius. There were Christian communities in Mediolanum, which contributed its share of martyrs during the persecutions, but the first bishop of Milan who has a firm historical presence is Merocles, who was at the Council of Rome of 313. In the mid-fourth century, the Arian controversy divided the Christians of Mediolanum; Constantius supported Arian bishops and at times there were rival bishops. Auxentius of Milan (died 374) was a respected Arian theologian.
At the time of the bishop St. Ambrose (bishop 374–397), who quelled the Arians, and emperor Theodosius I, Mediolanum reached the height of its ancient power. The city also possessed a number of basilicas, added in the late fourth century AD. These are San Simpliciano, San Nazaro, San Lorenzo and the chapel of San Vittore, located in the basilica of Sant'Ambrogio. In general, the Late Empire encouraged the development of the applied arts in Mediolanum, with ivory and silver work being common in public building projects. In the crypt of the Duomo are ruins of the ancient church of Saint Tecla and the baptistry where St. Augustine of Hippo was baptized.
Encyclopedic content adapted from the Wikipedia article on Quadrilatero Romano, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
