In Milan, Italy's Piazza Sempione, which was formerly the site of the Porta Sempione, stands the triumphal arch known as the Arco della Pace.

Luigi Cagnola was the designer of the monument. At the request of the City of Milan and Napoleon, construction got under way in 1807 under the direction of Cagnola himself and under the supervision of Domenico Moglia, Nicola Pirovano, Francesco Peverelli, and Bai Gio Battista. When the Kingdom of Italy fell in 1814, the project was abandoned with the work halfway finished and several statues, including those of History and Poetry, already finished.

Emperor Franz I of Austria, who dedicated the edifice to the Congress of Vienna, the peace agreement that had united the various European nations in 1815, resumed construction on the structure in 1826.

After Luigi Cagnola passed away in 1833, Carlo Giuseppe Londonio took over the construction, finishing it in 1838 just in time for Ferdinand I, Emperor of Austria and King of Lombardy-Veneto, to witness the official opening.

Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel II entered Milan triumphantly on June 8, 1859, four days after Magenta's victory, to the applause of the public.

Only the new dedicatory inscriptions at the top of the arches were changed after the city passed from Austrian to Piedmontese administration. The monument itself had already been finished more than twenty years earlier.