Chiesa di San Marco

This guide to Chiesa di San Marco in Milan centers on May 22, 1874, when Giuseppe Verdi, opera's most famous composer but a novice at conducting sacred music, led the premiere of his Requiem Mass here, written in memory of the writer Alessandro Manzoni. It follows the critics who called the piece too operatic for a Mass, and the four soloists, fresh from the European premiere of Aida, who sang it again three days later at La Scala. This Gothic nave, reworked into a Baroque hall in the 1600s, is the largest church in Milan after the Duomo.