Brera Academy

Palazzo Brera or Palazzo di Brera is a monumental palace in Milan, in Lombardy in northern Italy. It was a Jesuit college for two hundred years. It now houses several cultural institutions including the Accademia di Brera, the art academy of the city, and its gallery, the Pinacoteca di Brera; the Orto Botanico di Brera, a botanical garden; an observatory, the Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera; the Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere, a learned society; and an important library, the Biblioteca di Brera.

The Pinacoteca di Brera ("Brera Art Gallery") is the main public gallery for paintings in Milan, Italy. It contains one of the foremost collections of Italian paintings from the thirteenth to the twentieth century, an outgrowth of the cultural program of the Brera Academy, which shares the site in the Palazzo Brera.

The Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense or Braidense National Library, usually known as the Biblioteca di Brera, is a public library in Milan, in northern Italy. It is one of the largest libraries in Italy. Initially it contained large historical and scientific collections before it was charged with the legal deposit of all publications from Milan. Since 1880, it has had the status of a national library and is today one of the 47 Italian State libraries.

The Monument to Francesco Hayez is a bronze sculpture on a plinth located in piazzetta Brera (a small park just south of the main facade of the Brera Academy in Milan, Italy. The statue was commissioned in 1884, two years after the painter's death, from the sculptor Francesco Barzaghi, and inaugurated on 10 February 1890, on the seventh anniversary of his death. The plinth of the statue has two bas-reliefs in bronze depicting two of best known paintings: The Kiss and Le Veneziane (also known as La vendetta d'una rivale and one painting in the Revenge Triptych). Hayez is depicted standing in the act of painting with a brush. The inauguration was attended by Hayez's friends, Tranquillo Cremona and Luigi Bisi, and by Giuseppe Mongeri and the count Francesco Sebregondi, secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, as well as Hayez's widow, Angiolina Rossi. The main speech was given by the academy's president Emilio Visconti Venosta. Attending the ceremony were representatives from academies of Venice (Cavalieri Iacopo d'Andrea, professor of painting; Giacomo Franco, professor of architecture and director of the Royal Institute of Fine Arts; and Giuseppe Soranzo); Florence (Professor Camillo Boito); Turin (Professor Bartolomeo Giuliani); Bologna (engineer Solmi); Bergamo (Count Gianforte Suardi; and Rome (Senator Tullo Massarani and professor Giuseppe Bertini).

Santa Maria in Brera was a church in Milan, in Lombardy in northern Italy. It was built by the Humiliati between 1180 and 1229, given a marble façade and Gothic portal by Giovanni di Balduccio in the fourteenth century, and deconsecrated and partly demolished under Napoleonic rule in the early nineteenth century. The Napoleonic rooms of the Pinacoteca di Brera occupy the upper floor of what was the nave.

The Orto Botanico di Brera (5,000 m2) is a botanical garden located behind Palazzo Brera at Via Brera 28 in the center of Milan, Lombardy, Italy, and operated by the Istituto di Fisica Generale Applicata of the University of Milan. It is open weekdays without charge. The garden was established in 1774 by Abbot Fulgenzio Vitman under the direction of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, transforming an existing Jesuit garden to serve students of medicine and pharmacology. The garden was restored in 1998 after a long period of neglect and decay. Today the garden consists primarily of rectangular flower-beds, trimmed in brick, with elliptical ponds from the 18th century, and specula and greenhouse from the 19th century (now used by the Academy of Fine Arts). It contains one of the oldest Ginkgo biloba trees in Europe, as well as mature specimens of Firmiana platanifolia, Juglans nigra, Pterocarya fraxinifolia, and Tilia.

The Orto Botanico di Cascina Rosa (about 22,000 m2) is a botanical garden maintained by the University of Milan, and located at the end of Via Carlo Valvassori Peroni, Milan, Italy. It is open daily. The garden was established on disused farmland in 2002 for research and education. Its primary research facilities are three greenhouses that include a total of 10 separate compartments that support modern technology including cryopreservation, molecular testing, etc. Current research includes genetic improvement of rice, and exploration of useful genes in Arabidopsis thaliana. The garden's grounds contain many labeled plants, lawns, a lake, and about 1 km of walking paths.

San Marco is a church in Milan, northern Italy.

Palazzo Cusani is a 17th-century palace in Milano, remodelled a first time between 1712 and 1719 and a second time between 1775 and 1779. Historically belonging to the sestiere of Porta Nuova, it is located at via Brera 13–15.

The Brera Observatory (Italian: Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera) is an astronomical observatory in the Brera district of Milan, Italy. It was built in the historic Palazzo Brera in 1764 by the Jesuit astronomer Roger Boscovich. Following the suppression of the Jesuits by Clement XIV on 21 July 1773, the palace and the observatory passed to the then rulers of northern Italy, the Austrian Habsburg dynasty. Following the independence of Italy in 1861, the observatory has been run by the Italian government. In 1862, the newly installed Italian government improved the observatory's facilities by commissioning a 218mm Merz Equatorial Refracting Telescope to the German constructor Georg Merz. In 1946 the observatory became part of the scientific institutions of the new born Italian Republic and since 2001 it has become part of the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF). Astronomer Margherita Hack worked at the Observatory from 1954 to 1964, until she became Professor of the Institute of Physics at the Trieste University. Today the Observatory's staff consists of approximatively one hundred people. The research area covers a large range of fields from planets to stars, black holes, galaxies, gamma-ray bursts and cosmology. The Observatory is also active in the technological research applied to the astronomical instrumentation and it is one of the world leaders in the development of X-ray astronomy optics and light instrumentation for space missions.

The Museum of the Risorgimento (Italian: Museo del Risorgimento), located in the 18th-century Milanese Palazzo Moriggia, houses a collection of objects and artworks which illustrate the history of Italian unification from Napoleon's first Italian campaign of 1796 to the annexation of Rome in 1870. The city of Milan played a key role in the process, most notably on the occasion of the 1848 uprising against the Austrians known as the Five Days of Milan.

Santa Maria del Carmine is a church in Milan, Italy. It was built in 1446.