Several years ago in a life very much different than mine today, I was at a leadership conference where our facilitators asked us a straight-forward question: Describe your perfect day.
I had just returned a few days earlier from a five-day motorcycle ride through Colorado and Wyoming, so my answer came to me right away. I love a day that has a “wow” moment. The vision of the Grand Tetons was still fresh in my memory, the way the peaks slowly became visible from my vantage point of my Indian Springfield.
I consider myself fortunate that I’ve had many “wow” moments over the years. While I had my fair share before we moved overseas, they have certainly increased in number since we’ve been abroad.
One of the more recent “wow” moments was when we entered the Basilica of Saint Ambrogio in Milan.
From the outside, I didn’t expect the level of “wow” that awaited. As with much of Milan’s architecture, the basilica’s red brick exterior is surprisingly simple, especially compared with Milan’s stunning Duomo Cathedral.
But walking from the street through the columned atrium to the basilica’s entrance, one feels a sense of approaching a special place. Corie, our friend Kim, and I were fortunate to have the atrium to ourselves for a short while, and we took advantage of our solitude to enjoy the carved figures on the column capitals and the stones from an earlier cemetery mounted in the walls.
It wasn’t long before we could imagine the bustling scene the atrium would have been in the Middle Ages with a market and bands of pilgrims crowding the space. Groups of tourists, following their flag-wielding guides, congregated in the atrium, making me grateful for our moment of serenity.
The basilica’s two differently sized belltowers, easily noticeable before one enters the atrium, are a brick monument to man’s inability to get along with his fellow man when said men join different groups. Two communities, monks and priests, inhabited the basilica, and the monks weren’t keen on sharing their bell tower with the priests. In the early 1100s, the priests were granted permission to build their own bell tower.
Today’s Saint Ambrogio, rebuilt in the late eleventh century on a site of a fourth-century church, is modeled after the Roman public basilicas, or town meeting halls, a style early Christian churches adopted.
The windowless nave shuts out the outside world while pools of light from the dome’s windows cast a warm glow around the golden high altar, a reliquary-tomb, described as one of the greatest masterpieces of Carolingian art, housing the remains the basilica’s founder, St. Ambrose, and two Christian martyrs, Protasius and Gervasius.
My “wow” moment came as I admired the small chapels bordering the nave. While the aforementioned Duomo Cathedral houses an impressive collection of religious artworks, the mosaics, paintings and sculpture in the Saint Ambrogio Cathedral were more intimate, allowing the visitor to appreciate the baroque-era masterworks.
The simplicity of the nave separates visitors from the outside world while the chapels transports them, through detailed carving and masterful brushwork, to another place and another time. I couldn't have asked for a better day.
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