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If you feel it just ain’t a club unless there’s bouncers and velvet ropes keeping the less-than-perfect at bay, then Plastic is the trendy spot for you. Inside, there’s a mix of techno, house and jungle – background to the pick-up scene for all tastes (Thursday is officially gay/lesbian night). There’s also a laid-back billiards room, with jukebox favourites.

Rolling Stone is as classic as the band after which it is named; a no-excuses, party-hard, rock-music discotheque filling a cavernous ex-cinema with huge crowds drawn to hear the best live rock acts of any venue in town. We’re talking everything from Iron Maiden to Van Morrison, Nick Cave to Oasis. Weekends – when there are no international rock stars on the bill – the sound system is turned over to Milan’s top DJs, and the crowd gets a chance to throw down some moves on the floor.

Part bar, part restaurant, part pizzeria and part jazz club that doesn’t limit itself to jazz. In summer, the party spills out onto a barge moored opposite. Since 1971, “Monkeys” has been shaking up the Navigli nightlife scene with live music daily until 3am.

George Lucas knew that even his vaunted digital special effects couldn’t hold a candle to the extraterrestrial beauty of Lake Como, which, with very little touching-up, filled in for Naboo’s lake district in the fifth Star Wars instalment, Attack of the Clones (2002). Beautiful Villa Balbianello (see Villa Balbianello, Lake Como) is again a backdrop for romantic scenes.

Under Toscanini’s direction, La Scala started opening up to foreign works, including this Stravinsky classic.

Before gaining international fame, Bernardo Bertolucci made this 1969 story of a dysfunctional family haunted by the fascist past. He set this psychological drama in the quirky town of Sabbioneta.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s usual mix of sex, homosexuality and a communist critique on the emptiness of bourgeois life defines this 1968 film. Handsome stranger Terrence Stamp raises the libidos of a middle-class Milanese family, then further stirs up their lives by disappearing.

Tunnel is actually a warehouse squirrelled away under the arches on the back side of the main railway station (Stazione Centrale). This is the place to catch the next big thing in Italian, and sometimes even international, alternative rock acts and top DJs.

Puccini struck lucky again with exotic Asian fare – and, for once, a happy(ish) ending.

The first place D H Lawrence and his lover Frieda settled during their European peregrinations was the shores of Lake Garda, during the winter of 1912–13. In 1916 he compiled his notes on those happy first months spent in Italy and wrote this travelogue.