Milan’s Chapel of Bones
Milan may claim to exist on earth as it is in heaven, but in truth, inside every city, in every era, and in all of us, are rooms where skeletons are stored; all we can do is find a way to see those bones as jewels, and dare to be adorned.
Known for its glamour and sophistication, Milan is a place where reputation precedes reality. A capital of culture whose residents have cultivated a world-renowned sense of style, design and urbane lifestyle, it’s nearly impossible to separate the city from the heady expectations you might have of it. So as not to end up on the back one, Milan always puts its best foot forward.
At first impression, it might seem jarring that such a place is home to a chapel full of human bones. Entering the small sanctuary of San Bernardino Alle Ossa through a spotless square scarcely down the street from the pristine Milan Cathedral and Galleria Vittorio Emanuele – a similarly sacred structure to the Milanese, where high-fashion houses have claimed prime real estate for their flagship stores – feels akin to stepping outside the frame of a city that knows its good side and seeing it from a more obscure angle in a much dimmer light.
The story of the shrine at San Bernardino is a bit of a chilling one. In the year 1210, one of the city’s graveyards became insufficient in containing the bodies of its dead, leaving no other option than to collect the remains of the long dead from the graves and house them instead in an ossarium, a bone room, where they’ve remained for almost a millennium.
In a city renowned for appearing to be at its best at all times, what does one make of a place like San Bernardino’s humble bone room? Some might say the ossarium is a visible seam in a hall of mirrors – a flaw that makes you realise that a seemingly infinite corridor is a pane of glass and little else. I would argue the contrary. Instead of shattering the illusion that Milan puts forth, the chapel of bones might be a looking glass into a layer of the city that I’m not sure it regularly has the chance to embody. It exposes the fragility and fallibility of a place made up of people as fragile and fallible as any others, who cope with sickness and death akin to the rest of us, who hold as much history as anyplace else in the ancient country to which it reluctantly belongs.
Every so often the veil over how fractured and treacherously balanced our world really is becomes thin. In light of the strikingly similar waves of sickness and death that have washed the world over in recent years, the ossarium’s moral becomes all the more profound: no place, no matter how prestigious or privileged, is ever truly exempt from tragedy once history decides to repeat itself.
But what was most striking to me about this morbid shrine was that the moment in history that it memorialises might have otherwise been completely forgotten had the collectors of those bones not arranged them in such a way that they were, and still are, beautiful. And so I believe the ossarium also serves as a reminder that finding beauty in tragedy is how we strike back, how we dance with time and all its games – in this case, by creating something enduring from the very stuff of our own mortality.
Some places and people may dream and operate on the principle that as above, so it is below. Milan may claim to exist on earth as it is in heaven, but in truth, inside every city, in every era, and in all of us, are rooms where skeletons are stored. Whether it be in our homes, communities, cities, or the world beyond, all we can do is find a way to see those bones as jewels, and dare to be adorned.