
Chiesa di San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore
Frescoed Renaissance church known as Milan's Sistine Chapel, hiding a former cloistered nuns' choir.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Chiesa di San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore opens on the execution of Countess Bianca Maria di Challant in October 1526, convicted of talking a soldier into murdering one of her lovers. It moves to this dividing wall, once the barrier between cloistered Benedictine nuns and the public, and to Bernardino Luini's fresco of the beheading of Saint Catherine, painted only four years after the countess died. Milan gossip long insisted the painter borrowed her face for the doomed saint. Look for the grate cut into the wall where the nuns once watched Mass unseen.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Basilica di Santa Maria delle Grazie
Renaissance dining hall holding Leonardo's Last Supper mural, saved by sandbags when wartime bombs destroyed the room around it.
Chiesa di Santa Maria
Renaissance church famed for a painted choir barely a metre deep that fools the eye into a soaring hall.
Leonardo's Last Supper Museum
Fragile wall mural of Christ's final meal, painted in an experimental dry technique that began flaking within years.
Museo Diocesano
Sacred-art museum in a restored medieval Dominican cloister, with gilded panels and centuries of devotional works.
Santuario di Santa Maria dei Miracoli presso San Celso
Renaissance sanctuary built around a painted Madonna reported to have moved before three hundred witnesses in fourteen eighty-five.
Basilica di San Vittore al Corpo
Renaissance basilica atop a Roman mausoleum, holding the intact relics of a beheaded soldier-martyr.