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 .