Milan can be defined as "Masonic city" in excellence. In 1756 a lodge was founded in Milan, soon discovered by the Austrian authorities; the fact brought about an edict (6 May 1757) with which the governor, Francis, Duke of Modena, forbade Masonic meetings throughout the state. But the lodge continued to exist in 1783 and joined the Grand Lodge of Vienna. The following year the Earl Wilczeck, plenipotentiary imperial minister in Milan, assumed the office of Provincial Grand Master for the Austrian Lombardy.

With the Napoleonic conquest, March 16, 1805, it was officially founded in Milan the Italian Supreme Council of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, through the activity and efforts of the French count Alexandre Francois Auguste de Grasse Tilly, due to the powers conferred by the Supreme Council of Charleston (the first Supreme Council of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite). On June 20, 1805, by the initiative of the founders of the Supreme Council, the Grand Orient of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite was established. On that occasion, the Viceroy of Italy, Eugene de Beauharnais was elected as Sovereign Grand Commander and Prince Joachim Murat as Grand Chancellor. Milan had a dozen lodges.
Milan can be considered one of the places where he the first steps the modern Italian Freemasonry habe been taken, and also one of the reference city s throughout the nineteenth century. Among the "brothers" in Milan, including various protagonists of the story, some names are remembered by the town streets, while others are recognizable in their graves at the Monumental Cemetery, where they wanted to be portrayed with masonry  symbols, as in the case of the tomb of Fedele Sala, in the halls of the former crematorium (the first in Europe) commissioned by Freemason Albert Keller, where  the square and the compass, the Jakin and Boaz columns, the Delta with the eye of the Great Architect of the Universe, and much more are reproduced.

Despite this architectonic traces of Masonic history are very few.

One is the so-called "Temple of the Night" in the Park of Villa Finzi, Gorla district, a few steps from Viale Monza. From historical sources it appears that the cave and the temple were built by order of Count Giuseppe Antonio Batthyany who purchased the property in 1829. Due to the Batthyany family we can see the neoclassical villa, landscaped garden, the lake, the cave, and  -  inside a cavity once used as artificial ice room -  the building of the Temple of the Night, a structure that is part of a complex architectural project, astronomical and symbolic linked to Freemasonry.

The other temple is located underground in Cernusco Sul Naviglio in the suburbs east of Milan, in the city center and within the hospital grounds. The Temple was built by Count Ambrose Uboldo, Mason, who had it built in the garden of his villa, between 1808 and 1816.