Milano città militare in epoca napoleonica (1800-1814)

This article aims to fill a gap in the historiography on the Napoleonic Milan (1796-1814), providing an overall and analytic picture of the military presence in the capital city of a vast Italian State. The unpublished archives documentation, also rich in statistical data, allows to reconstruct an overview of the armed forces – military and paramilitary – permanently present intra moenia and the logistics that supported them. It is also proposed a preliminary assessment of the relations between the military world and the urban civil dimension, also in a comparison both with the Milan, as stronghold of previous historical periods (Spanish and Austrian), and with other cities of the same Napoleonic period. Ultimately, the case of Milan does not appear to fit with the traditional imaginary that attributes a sort of ‘universal militarization’ to the Revolutionary-Napoleonic Era even in the Italian Peninsula.