To enter the Royal Rooms of the Palace, one goes up the Scalone d'onore, a monumental staircase designed by Giuseppe Piermarini in the 1770s at the behest of Maria Theresa of Austria. In fact, there was no monumental entrance in the late Gothic building before the reconstruction of the Palace in 1777.
In the first months of 1769, the great architect of the Royal Palace of Caserta, Luigi Vanvitelli, arrived in Milan, accompanied by a pupil who was still mostly unknown at the time, Giuseppe Piermarini from Foligno. The two architects found themselves in Hapsburg Milan, a city moved by a new reforming fervor, also from an architectural point of view. In fact, a neoclassical reconstruction of the city was underway based on the cancellation of the original urban aspect of which the Royal Palace, then Palazzo Ducale, was the focal point. The typically Hapsburg inclination towards sobriety, rigor and economic prudence meant that Vanvitelli's project for the rearrangement of the Palazzo was discarded to make room for his pupil Piermarini who thus became court architect. To his intervention, in the second half of the seventies of the eighteenth century, we owe the current neoclassical appearance of the Palace, the royal square, the passage of rooms that became the Royal Apartments and the magnificent Grand Staircase. Certainly the Scalone is inspired by that of the master built in the Royal Palace of Caserta, however remodeling the typical Vanvitellian dialogue between Baroque and neoclassical language through new sobriety and architectural rigor deduced from the European lesson of the royal courts. In this sense, the Scalone is the full expression of Neoclassicism in Milan in which order and sober majesty prevail. The Scalone thus creates a path of ascent towards the Sale Reali, a movement crowned by the fresco decoration on the ceiling by Andrea Appiani depicting the Aurora, as if to give new awakening and new life to the city and to the Palace itself of which it represents .

The style of Giuliano Traballesi - one of the most successful fresco painters in the Milanese artistic environment together with Martin Knoller - is characterized by the search for balance and the sobriety of the neoclassical movement. Painter of exquisite decorative taste, lover of half-tones and light colors, with a Tiepolesque impasto, he created the fresco of Aurora that embellishes the vault of the Grand Staircase of Palazzo Reale, designed by Giuseppe Piermarini.

The fresco represents the image of a winged young woman, who carries a torch high, surrounded by four cherubs carrying a mix of roses and daisies of various colors, while the chariot of the Sun led by Apollo dominates the background of light.
The female character represents Aurora, the Roman goddess (Eos for the Greeks) who opens the doors of the day after having harnessed the horses to the chariot of the Sun and who pours the dew on the earth, announcing morning to the world.

The portrait of Lady Venetia Digby as an allegory of Prudence is both a memory of fresh beauty and an authentic symbolic "monument" to the lady's virtues, probably executed immediately after her early death in 1633.

Three cupids wear a laurel wreath on the noblewoman's head, a tribute to her virtue. Dressed in a large "old-fashioned" red cloak but with a hairstyle and jewels that correspond to the fashion of her time, the gentlewoman is seated on a simple square block of stone, a symbol of moral solidity.

Lady Venetia caresses two white doves, a symbol of innocence and conjugal fidelity, while holding a snake in her right hand, the traditional attribute of the virtue of Prudence. On the left, three allegorical figures lie defeated on the ground: in the background, Fraud, with two faces, chained; further on, profane love, blindfolded, and another cupid in tears, with the torch extinguished and his legs ending in a snake's tail, an allusion to sin.

In March 1804, the Vice-President of the Republic, Francesco Melzi d'Eril, commissioned the Roman mosaicist Giacomo Raffaelli (1753-1836) to create a majestic centerpiece to decorate the banquet offered by the Viceroy Eugene of Beauharnais in homage to the new sovereign, which was to take place in Room of the Caryatids of Palazzo Reale on the occasion of the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte as King of Italy on 26 May 1805.

The centerpiece consists of a grandiose triptych formed by a central element of 9 meters, flanked by two twin elements of 1.60 meters each. It depicts an imaginary Roman circus with the temple of Jupiter in the centre, around which the chariots of Apollo and Diana chase each other. On the spine of the circus two obelisks surrounded by sphinxes and two honorary columns in alabaster. Finally, a succession of amphorae, vases and cherubs borrowed from classical antiquity.

The triptych is completed by two symmetrical lateral elements which are made up respectively of a central temple surrounded by four Egyptian porphyry columns which support as many finely carved agate cups. To vary the perfect symmetry only the statues of the gods which are, in one case, Bacchus and Minerva and, in the other, Aesculapius and Ceres.

Neoclassicism, much loved by the new sovereign, meets the typical eclecticism of eighteenth-century Rome in the use of innumerable materials and colors such as white Carrara marble, Egyptian porphyry, the precious lapis lazuli and malachite stones and alabaster combined with metals such as gold and bronze.

However, Napoleonic sovereignty in Italy lasted only ten years and after its epilogue Milan witnessed the return of the Habsburg government which brought with it the change of taste and the consequent disuse of the monumental centerpiece.
This remains in the oblivion of the wardrobes until, in 1919, the building and all its art objects are sold to the State by Vittorio Emanuele III of Savoy. Three years later the art historian Roberto Papini comes across the fortuitous discovery of the pieces of the centrepiece.

The parterre was thus reassembled in the 1920s to restore its splendor to the forgotten masterpiece.

The centerpiece has been at the center of an important restoration project which sees its entire recomposition in the Sala delle Quattro Colonne with a new layout.

The clocks are examples of great artistic interest, bearing the signature of Francesco Manfredini and the title of King's Watchmaker: the clock of the Sabine women, the clock of the Muse Polimnia and the clock of Apollo and Diana - bearing Manfredini's signature on the dial - are all kept in the Royal Palace and date back to the first years of activity of the Eugenia Manufacture, founded in Milan in 1807 by the three Manfredini brothers at the behest of the Viceroy of Italy Eugenio de Beauharnais. In particular, the clock of the Sabines, whose name derives from the painting Le Sabine by Jacques-Louis David, which the Manfredinis must have admired during their stay in Paris. The watch dates back to 1807, the year in which Francesco Manfredini was appointed King's Watchmaker - the dial bears the signature "Manfredini Orolo.ro del Re a Milano".

The double attribution of the pendulum clock is justified by the existence of some similarities and affinities of style with the French-made watch models (in particular with those produced by Claude Galle and Pierre-Philippe Thomier). In fact, several examples of the same watch have been identified, all similar to each other, but signed by different craftsmen.
The Sabine clock, for example, has a twin example now displayed in the Green Drawing Room of Windsor Castle and also dating from around 1806. The two clocks have only a few differences in the lower frieze: in the Milanese version there is in fact no group of the four characters on the right (symmetrical to the left group), which instead is present in the English one.

In 1743 the Bâtiments du Roi commissioned Jean-François de Troy to make a series of tapestries for the Gobelins Manufactory. The theme of the series The story of Jason and Medea is taken from the VII book of Ovid's Metamorphoses. The entire cycle is made up of seven tapestries representing scenes from the Greek myth: Jason promises faith to Medea; Jason tames the bulls; Dragon-toothed soldiers turn their weapons against each other; Jason takes the Golden Fleece; The marriage of Jason and Creusa; Creusa is killed by the magical robe that Medea gave her; Medea stabs her two sons by Jason, sets fire to Corinth and leaves for Athens.

Several series have been made with the same theme. The first complete series, woven from wool and silk between 1750 and 1754, was requested from the Gobelins by the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne (Royal Depot of Furniture) in 1758. In 1770, the tapestries were used to decorate the pavilion erected in Strasbourg for Marie Antoinette's entry into France as wife of Louis XVI. In 1775 the entire series was donated to Archduke Maximilian of Austria, son of Maria Theresa of Austria and brother of Marie Antoinette, by Louis XV. The archduke, in turn, sent him to the Palazzo Reale in Milan.

The series remained in Milan under the rule of Eugene de Beauharnais, nephew of Napoleon and viceroy of Italy. During the Restoration period the tapestries of Jason, except one - Jason Taming the Bulls - still attested in the Royal Palace in 1900, were temporarily moved to the Royal Villa of Monza to make room for the series of the Acts of the Apostles by Raphael, at least until 1908 when they returned to the Tapestry Halls of the Royal Palace and were kept there until 1943. The entire series was then moved to the Green Marble Table Hall (then the Tapestry Hall) on the second floor of Villa Carlotta in Tremezzo, to protect it from bombing by the allies. In 2000, the tapestries returned to the Royal Palace as part of the Royal Palace Museum project, which saw an initial reorganization of the historic rooms.