This atlas of Milan traces the history of the shape of the city, its morphology, and of the buildings in it, their typology. And because architecture and city can be understood as background for everyday, and less-everyday life, with dwellings as the general material a city is made of and monuments as the festive exceptions in it, this atlas also traces the reasons for their shapes. The book does a perhaps courageous attempt at an explanation of the historical development of Milan with the aim of defining the typical Milanese form of urbanity, the character of which may lie in the specific type of apartment buildings and in the monuments with the geometrically defined shape of the public space that they bring along.