Our visit to the Santa Maria Grazie convent to see Leonardo's Last Supper was part of a walking tour of Milan, for reasons discussed in the previous page. The Last Supper was the first stop on the tour, and after using up our allotted time with this masterpiece, we were left with Everything Else. For us (and probably for some of the other tour attendees), the Everything Else was something of an afterthought – we'd mainly signed up for the tour so we could see The Last Supper on relatively short notice. Not that we were opposed to seeing more of Milan, but the other destinations listed in the tour description were places that hadn't shown up on our radar when we were researching points of interest in the city (you'll see some of those later). But we ended up seeing some interesting places as part of the tour, and found the entire tour to be a worthwhile endeavor.

We began the remainder of the tour by following our guide a fair distance eastward on Corso Magenta, the street that runs past Santa Maria delle Grazie. Eventually we noticed an elaborately decorated building called the Palazzo Litta. The palazzo was originally built around the middle of the 17th Century, with its rococo façade being added about 100 years later. It was owned by influential Milanese families for many years, and was the site of several receptions for prominent visitors from places like Spain, Austria and France, including Maria Theresa of Austria and Napoleon Bonaparte (of France, duh). There is a theater in the palazzo which is still in use. It was once an oratory for the Arese family (the original owners) and is now the oldest theater in Milan.

We did not visit the Palazzo Litta, however – our first destination was a church across the street from it, the Chiesa di San Maurizio.

The Chiesa di San Maurizio is not especially interesting-looking from the street, especially when compared to the Palazzo Litta. However, an uninformed passerby might be surprised to learn that the church has been called "The Sistine Chapel of Milan". But on entering the church, it's easy to see why someone might make this comparison – there are frescoes and paintings all over the place. Not on the ceiling, though. And there's nothing by Michelangelo, or Botticelli or Ghirlandaio or Perugino, for that matter. The principal artist behind all of the decoration was Bernardino Luini, who worked on the church between 1522 and 1530. Luini was heavily influenced by Leonardo da Vinci (with whom he is thought to have worked directly at some point, though not on this church) and Raphael. Other artists worked on the church as well, eventually including Luini's sons Aurelio and Giovan Pietro. They worked on a number of side chapels in the church, some of which we couldn't see during our visit because of restoration work in progress.



The church as it exists now was built between 1503 and 1518, and it was built with two purposes in mind. First, it was going to be a church for local worshippers, and second, it was going to be a chapel for a community of nuns living in an adjoining monastery (the church's full name is Chiesa di San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore, or Church of San Maurizio at the Great Monastery). This plan was complicated by the fact that the nuns were required to remain isolated from the public at large. The problem was addressed by the inclusion of a large partition wall dividing the church into two, with the only connection between the two parts being a grating in the wall through which the nuns could hear mass being delivered. This wall created another flat surface that needed decorating, and Luini was happy to oblige.


There were in fact doors between the two sections of the church, but they were always kept locked until after the nuns moved out in the 19th Century. Over the years the former nuns' choir saw use as a barracks, a girls' school and a military hospital. But now it's been restored to its former appearance and is open for all visitors to admire.

A balcony runs all the way around the upper part of the walls of the nuns' choir, including along the top of the partition wall. Frescoes cover the entire partition wall, both above and below the balcony.


The organ in the nuns' choir is extremely old-school, having been installed in 1554.

Frescoes can also be found throughout the rest of the nuns' choir.



The church and monastery were built on the site of some ancient Roman ruins, and incorporate some of the Roman elements. One of the cloisters of the former monastery has been turned into the Milan Archaeological Museum. The museum was not included as part of the tour, but there were a few artifacts out front where we could see them.

We took our leave of the church and museum and continued on Corso Magenta, eventually reaching some ancient Roman ruins. These ruins were unearthed in the 1950s and have been identified as part of an Imperial Palace that was built here in the late 3rd Century AD, during the reign of Emperor Maximianus, who had moved the seat of the royal court to Milan.

The next portion of the tour consisted of walking around this part of Milan while our guide pointed out historical or interesting buildings and sculptures.


One such building was this one, which was an important piece of the inspiration behind Ernest Hemingway's 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms. This novel was set during the Italian campaign of the First World War and involves a relationship between an American ambulance driver and a nurse, which develops when the ambulance driver is wounded and is sent to a hospital in Milan. This premise is something that happened to Hemingway, pretty much exactly, and this building, which now houses a bank, was the Red Cross hospital to which Hemingway was sent after his injury. There is a plaque on the wall which explains all of this.

We finally arrived at our last stop of the tour, the Santa Maria presso San Satiro church. Internet sources are in disagreement over details of its construction, but most of the work on the church in its present form seems to have taken place, maybe off and on, between about 1470 and 1490. There appear to have been two principal architects: Donato Bramante (who would later work on Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan and on St. Peter's Basilica in Rome) and Giovanni Antonio Amadeo. There are conflicting accounts on the relative involvement of these two men in the design and construction, but there appears to be general agreement that the work on the façade was mostly done by Amadeo (though some say the work was based on plans by Bramante), and Bramante was responsible for the baptistery and for the choir area behind the altar.

The choir area has probably been the church's most famous feature over the centuries. In what appears to have been a huge change in plans, it seems that a plan to build the church's apse so that it would cross the road Via Falcone (thus eliminating a section of the road), was rejected, well into the construction phase. So instead of a thirty-foot-long choir, the choir was now limited to a depth of just three feet. Rather than make a huge stink about the situation (this would have been career suicide at this stage of Bramante's career), Bramante came up with the idea of a design for the choir that played some games with perspective to make the choir appear much deeper when viewed from the center aisle. Other artists had played similar tricks, mostly with ceiling frescoes, and in the 18th Century the technique would acquire the name trompe l’oeil ("deceive the eye"). This solved the problem, sort of – when viewed from the side, the choir looks pretty strange.

The church also has some other fairly standard features which were executed nicely.


The left side of the transept leads to a chapel called the Cappella della Pietà, which is a leftover fragment of an older church that had occupied this space since 879. The chapel gets its name from a 1482 terracotta sculpture by Agostina de Fondulis depicting the Lamentation Over the Dead Christ.

Off to the right is the Bramante-designed baptistery, which is narrow but tall, octagonal in shape and has a dome of its own. There are a number of terracotta bas-reliefs in the baptistery, also executed by Fondulis.


At this point we said farewell to our guide, leaving him a nice tip, and found ourselves some lunch. Thus recharged, our next object of attack was an imposing one – we would next pay a visit to Milan's famous (and immense) Duomo.