A short walk down a dimly lit corridor in the Church of Santa Maria Presso San Satiro leads to one of the more unusual sights in Milan, a small space known as the Santuario Bernardino alle Ossa, or the Bone Chapel.
I visited the chapel late one afternoon with my longtime friend Kim, a historian who attended graduate school with Corie.
Our spouses were churched out for the day, something that can easily happen in a city like Milan with so many amazing places to see, but Kim and I couldn’t resist the allure of such an unusual site.
While there is no fee to visit the chapel, a donation is strongly encouraged. The woman who was strongly encouraging our donation that afternoon was in her late 60s and knew three English phrases–no video, photos ok, no flash–which she repeated continuously and monotonously like a skipping record.
I started to wonder if her being stationed at the entryway was some form of penitence, dealing with the constant flow of small groups of tourists, in the hopes of a better eternal reward.
It became very obvious very quickly that the suggested donation was, in fact, more than a suggestion. Neither Kim nor I had any change with us, so we tried a different approach: try to look sad and pitiful long enough and wear the woman down so she’ll let us into the bone chapel out of the goodness of her heart.
Now I didn’t know this woman long enough to know if she had any goodness in her heart, and I’m not passing judgment on her for not reacting to our pronounced expression of disappointment like we had hoped. She might have been a very lovely woman, but anyone whose job it is to keep tourists in line all day while repeating "no video, photos ok, no flash" is not so easily swayed by cheap theatrics.
Fortunately for us, our expressions of woe did work on a friendly young woman who gave us a euro coin, which satisfied the definition of suggested donation.
Entering the ossuary feels like walking into Charles Addam’s imagination. Built in the early 1200s, skeletal remains of approximately 3,000 people overflow from an overcrowded adjacent cemetery, fill the walls, leading one’s gaze to the 17th-centrury ceiling frescoes surrounding four windows more than two stories above the altar, illuminating the room.
The elaborate arrangement of the remains decorating the walls was the work of sculptor Sebastiano Sala, who collaborated with the chapel’s architect.
While the practice of incorporating human remains in architecture might never be featured on an episode of HGTV, it wasn’t uncommon in the baroque era.
Aside from providing relief from overcrowded cemeteries, a widespread issue in medieval Milan, the arrangement of remains in the ossuaries were an avenue of artistic expression and helped drive home the fact that our existence on this world is finite. It’s difficult not to think about mortality in the gaze of thousands of hollow eyes.
The woman collecting suggested donations came into the room to shush the visitors and mechanically remind us that videos aren’t allowed, photos are permitted, but no flash.
Her shushing was likely driven out of habit, since the six other people in the chapel with us were quietly taking in the haunting space. While the ossuary might not be one of the top sights in Milan, it is certainly one of the more memorable to those who experience it.
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