Milan: The Chiesa Santa Maria Presso di San Satiro

San Satiro tucked away on Via Torino near the Duomo.

I must share with you today's article in Italian Notebook. All of you who are planning your day trips to Milan, add this to your list! This is about The Chiesa Santa Maria Presso di San Satiro, commonly known just as San Satiro, which is just south of the Duomo in Milan. Dating back to the 800s, the church was renovated in the second half of the 1400s by Bramante, and it is about one unusual feature of Bramante's design that we read:

No dice. Even for an architect such as Bramante, sometimes bureaucracy just gets in your way.

You’ve been commissioned by Milan’s Duke Sforza to rebuild the church of San Satiro. (Saint Satyrus was the brother and confessor of Saints Marcellina and Ambrose, the latter the patron Saint of Milan.) You’ve gotten the go-ahead from the religious authorities. It’s all systems go, funds in place….

… and then the town council construction board decides to ix-nay permission for the apse. The apse! Of all things, how absurd! How can you have a church without an apse!?

We can imagine Bramante calling on the Duke asking him to exert some pressure on the building permit people. No luck… testimony to the rule-observing, law-abiding Lombards that not even the Duke could get them to budge.

And so it was, no apse. Well, Bramante was certainly not one to back down from even a major mishap, so he decided to apply some of the high-falutin’ jiggery-pokery that was all the rage among intellectuals and mathematicians of the time… perspective.

Thanks to bureaucracy and permits not granted, we can enjoy one of the first instances of perspective trompe l’oeil. You get a visual “depth” of about thirty feet… in barely three feet of space.

See the original article in Italian Notebook here.

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