Milan commissioned this arcade in 1861, the year of Italian unification, naming it for the new kingdom's first king, and architect Giuseppe Mengoni built it between 1865 and 1877 as a glass-and-iron cross connecting Piazza del Duomo to Piazza della Scala.
Two intersecting barrel-vaulted arcades meet under a central glass dome, a structure larger in scale than the arcades that inspired it, London's Burlington Arcade and Brussels's Saint-Hubert Gallery, and one that went on to lend its own name, galleria, to shopping arcades built in its image afterward. Underfoot at the crossing, a mosaic zodiac wheel includes a bull representing Turin, and tradition holds that spinning three times on one heel over the bull's more sensitive anatomy brings good luck, a custom energetic enough that the mosaic there has needed periodic repair. Mengoni himself died in a fall from the arcade's scaffolding days before its official opening, a fact rarely mentioned on the plaques celebrating his achievement.
