Santuario di San Bernardino alle Ossa
Small Baroque chapel whose walls are entirely lined with roughly three thousand human skulls and bones.
Santuario di San Bernardino alle Ossa in Milan opens with a local legend: that every November second, a child's skeleton climbs down from this chapel's walls to lead the dead in a dance. Behind the altar, a small room holds roughly three thousand human skulls and bones, most from a hospital cemetery that ran out of space as early as 1210 and kept filling with the poor and executed prisoners for centuries after. The guide traces how a collapsed bell tower destroyed the original chapel in 1642, and the choice the rebuilders made about how to treat the bones inside it. Stand at eye level with the walls, the vantage point the chapel was built to be seen from.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.