Tomb of St. Ambrose of Milan

Great Churches of the World:
Sant' Ambrogio, Milan

Sant' Ambrogio, the oldest and most important of Milan's churches, was founded in 379 by its titular saint, Ambrose, then the formidable bishop of the city and baptizer of St. Augustine. Today he lies beneath its altar in a dim and solemn crypt. The whole church is filled with the grime and weight of history, making a visit there a contemplative and almost melancholic experience. As you approach it through the arcades of its atrim, the church's facade is low and solid with its great round Romanesque arches and mouldering brickwork, sparsely decorated save for weathered marble spoliae and a few sinister festoons of spiky ironwork. Two heavy Lombard-style square belfries flank the immense triangular gable, dating from the twelfth and eleventh centuries, but seeming even earlier, recalling some tarnished version of the glories of Ravenna. A great octagonal lantern marks the crossing, ringed with delicate arcading. Inside, you glimpse sparks of gold mosaic in the apse amid the darkness. You see the massive tenth-century pulpit that is set atop an ancient Roman sarcophagus, showing both the triumph of the Faith and the inescapability of history, and the death that makes life into history. Wonders stand in the farthest nooks and crannies, like the Sacello di San Vittore, decorated with stiff Byzantine mosaic'd saints in splendid blue and gold.

It is a trip back in time, to Old St. Peter's, to Old St. Peter's after it had stood for a thousand years at the dawn of the Renaissance, and like St. Peter's, the memory of its titular saint is omnipresent. He lies below in a new tomb, placed there after his relics were re-unearthed in the 1850s. It stands in the low-vaulted crypt, in a magnificent and strange glass ciborium framed with magnificent silver angels and arcane Greek inscriptions. Behind the glass lie the dusty, age-picked bones of Ambrose, his mitred skull giving off a strange, varnished gleam in the murky light. Faded scarlet vestments cover in baroque brocade cloth the recumbent corpse, flanked by the even more ancient outlines of St. Gervase and St. Protase, their bare brows crowned with gilded circlets, the golden martyr's palm clutched in what once was a hand. Their relics were discovered during his rule, fitting to lay beside him in death in recognition of his holiness and their bloody witness. And after you leave, there is something strange when you, filled with ecclesial quiet, meditate on his ancient heroism and holiness walking through the teeming, student-crowded Bramante cloisters of the Catholic university that stands nearby.