City of trams and fashion.

April days in Milan is a large furniture exhibition. Milan gathers guests from all over the world. Including from Russia. I came to this city for a few days and walked with pleasure along the streets and looked at the capital of fashion.

Milan - the capital of the region of Lombardy, the economic center of Italy, as well as the most populous city of the country. It constantly attracts a huge number of tourists who want not only to plunge into the nocturnal nightlife of Milan, which it is so famous for, but also to visit historical places and attractions such as the incredible beauty of the Gothic Duomo (Duomo di Milano), the oldest shopping arcade of the Victor Emmanuel Gallery II (Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II), the medieval Castello di Sforzesco, the picturesque Parco Sempione and, of course, the fresco of the Last Supper of the Great Leonardo. Among other things, Milan can be called the gastronomic center of Italian cuisine. In this city you can taste authentic traditional dishes and drinks, including world-famous varieties of white and red wines.

Milan trams

Constantly operating horse-drawn tram appeared in Milan relatively late - in 1881, but already in 1893 its electrification began (before the electric tram appeared only in Turin). By 1901 the horse in the city was completely replaced by an electric tram.

As in most European cities, in Milan the tram reached its heyday in the 1930s; the appearance of a trolleybus in 1933 did not lead to the replacement of a significant number of tram lines with trolley buses, as it often happened, trolleybus carriages remained and remain to this day concentrated on a long ring line around the city center.
After 1945, the system began to decline within the world trend, with the construction of the metro in the late 1950s, plans arose to replace most of the tram lines on the metro, and the rest - to buses. But, fortunately, these plans were implemented only in a very small amount - only the tram lines that duplicated the metro were closed. Thus, Milan was one of the few major cities in the West where the tram was not destroyed (along with Lisbon, Munich, Italian Turin and Rome). The extensive network of long-distance trams suffered from, which left only one line. Rapid reduction of the city network slowed down in the 1970s, when in Western Europe there are almost no trams left. Moreover, in these years there was some renewal of the rolling stock. In the 1990s, the revival of the tramway in Milan began - most of the lines removed were rebuilt and some new sites were built (primarily in the south).
Now the length of the current network is 126.5 kilometers (18th in the world, 16th in Europe):

This is the largest in Western Europe, the traditional tram system (not converted into a high-speed tram (Stadtbann), as in Cologne / Bonn or Brussels). The basis of the network is the diametrical lines passing through the city center, often parallel to the metro lines. The only thing that was modernized in the network structure - with the extension of the radii, the route scheme was replaced by a linear one (one radius - one route).
The system consists of 11.5 kilometers of isolated interurban link (Komazin-Limbiate inter-city line, shown in blue on the map). More than 10 km of interurbanes are now in the process of modernization and integration into the urban transport system (the line to Desio).
The network covers the whole city, but I was little where was except the center:

Trams perfectly combined with Romanesque church architecture and narrow streets, built up with massive classic buildings.

---

It is interesting that the streets of Milan are not only new series of trams in modern design and streamlined forms, but also old trams. It's very beautiful and immerses you in history. In addition, I saw a tram-restaurant. It's great!