San Bernardino alle Ossa: Milan's Bone Chapel

A small side chapel near Piazza Santo Stefano, its walls covered floor to ceiling in human bones arranged into crosses, pilasters and decorative panels. San Bernardino alle Ossa is one of the few ossuary chapels in Italy, it is free to enter, and it is a twenty-minute walk from Taylor's Love Solferino B&B.

Ossuary of San Bernardino alle Ossa, Milan. Photo: Giovanni Dall'Orto, Wikimedia Commons.

Getting There from Our B&B

On foot: approximately 2.0 km, about 25 minutes from Via Solferino 56, through the centre past the Duomo and east towards Santo Stefano.

By metro: Duomo (M1/M3) or Missori (M3), then a five-minute walk.

Why the Bones Are There

This is not a curiosity built for effect. In 1210 the cemetery beside the nearby hospital ran out of room, and a chamber was built to hold the exhumed bones. A church was added in 1269.

The present chapel dates from a rebuilding in 1695 after the old one collapsed, when the bones were arranged decoratively in the Baroque taste – a treatment intended as a meditation on mortality rather than a spectacle.

The remains are those of ordinary Milanese: hospital patients, plague victims, prisoners, and the poor buried at the city's expense over four centuries. The ceiling fresco of 1695 by Sebastiano Ricci shows a triumph of souls rising, which is the point the whole room is making.

What to Look For

• The arrangement – skulls set into niches, long bones forming pilasters and crosses. Deliberate, symmetrical, disconcertingly calm.
• The ceiling fresco – Sebastiano Ricci's Triumph of Souls among Angels, the counterweight to what is below.
• The main church – beyond the ossuary, a quiet eighteenth-century interior that most visitors ignore.
• Santo Stefano Maggiore next door – the church outside which the painter Caravaggio was baptised in 1571.

Practical Information

• Admission: free.
• Opening hours: roughly 08:00 to 12:00 and 13:00 to 18:00 on weekdays, shorter at weekends. It closes for services.
• Time needed: fifteen or twenty minutes.
• Behaviour: this is consecrated ground and a burial place. Photography is generally tolerated without flash, but keep it discreet and quiet.
• Children: use your judgement – some find it fascinating, others do not.

Nearby

The chapel is a few minutes from the Duomo, and close to the Ca' Granda, the vast fifteenth-century hospital – now the university – whose dead filled this ossuary. Seeing the two together makes the history considerably clearer.

Why Staying in Brera Makes the Difference

Taylor's Love Solferino B&B is at Via Solferino 56 in Zone 1, the historic centre, between Brera, Moscova and Corso Garibaldi. Small free places with awkward opening hours are exactly the ones you only manage to see when you are staying centrally.

For travellers who prefer a short stay apartment in Milan centre to a hotel, the B&B offers free self check-in with a smart lock. Porta Garibaldi FS, 700 metres away, connects directly to Malpensa Airport with the Malpensa Express.