San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore

Behind a sober grey-stone front on Corso Magenta hides one of the most completely painted interiors of the Italian Renaissance. Almost every surface of San Maurizio — walls, chapels, lunettes, vaults — is covered with sixteenth-century frescoes, and Milanese writers have long called it the city's own "Sistine Chapel". It was the church of the Monastero Maggiore, the largest and wealthiest Benedictine convent for women in Milan, and its plan still tells that story: a solid partition wall splits the building in two, with a hall for the lay congregation in front and a hidden hall for the nuns behind.

The convent is recorded from the eighth or ninth century and was first dedicated to the Virgin; in 964 Emperor Otto I gave it a relic of Saint Maurice, whose name the church later took. The present building was begun in 1503 to designs by Gian Giacomo Dolcebuono, working with Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, and was completed around 1518 by Cristoforo Solari. The façade is faced with grey Ornavasso stone. Inside, a single vaulted nave is lined with groin-vaulted side chapels, topped by a loggia of serliana openings. Two towers of Roman Milan survive in the complex — a polygonal one from the Maximian walls and a square one from the vanished circus, reused as the bell tower — and the former convent buildings now house the city's archaeological museum.

The painting is dominated by Bernardino Luini, the favourite artist of Milan's aristocracy in the decades after Leonardo. On the dividing wall he painted saints, angels and kneeling donors around the story of Saint Maurice, and on the nuns' side a cycle of the Passion; in 1530 he decorated the Besozzi chapel with scenes of Saint Catherine and Christ at the column. His sons Aurelio, Giovan Pietro and Evangelista painted most of the remaining chapels after mid-century, and Antonio Campi supplied the altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi in 1578. The nuns' hall has a starry vault with God, the Evangelists and angels, and an organ built in 1554 by Giovan Giacomo Antegnati that still works with fully mechanical action. Milan itself, the capital of Lombardy, grew from Roman Mediolanum into the seat of the Visconti and Sforza dukes; San Maurizio shares Corso Magenta with Santa Maria delle Grazie, home of Leonardo's Last Supper.

Getting there

The church stands on Corso Magenta in central Milan, about 1 km west of the Brera district. Milan Linate Airport (LIN) is about 8 km away in a straight line. Cadorna station, served by metro lines M1 and M2 and by Ferrovienord trains, is roughly 350 m to the northwest.