Church sights in Milan
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Chiesa di San Francesco al Fopponino
The 1964 Gio Ponti-designed church is out of the way but a must if you want to see the Milanese master’s key works. The white facade’s use of diamond motifs echoes the panes of a stained-glass window while Ponti’s rendering of an archetypal church roofline evokes a child’s elemental drawing.
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A
San Lorenzo Maggiore
The touching simplicity of this early Christian basilica with its central dome and squat towers managed to survive a substantial reconstruction in the 16th century. The octagonal Cappella di Sant’Aquilino’s 4th-century mosaic of a toga-clad Jesus holding court is also the real deal; the highly individual and seemingly cosmopolitan apostles in his thrall make the millennia fly by.
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B
Basilica di Sant’Ambrogio
St Ambrose, Milan’s patron saint and one-time superstar bishop, is buried in the crypt of the mainly 11th-century Romanesque Basilica di Sant’Ambrogio, which he founded in AD 379. It’s a fitting legacy, built and rebuilt with a purposeful simplicity that is truly uplifting: the seminal Lombard Romanesque basilica. Shimmering altar mosaics and a biographical AD 835 gilt altarpiece light up the shadowy vaulted interior. Along the south aisle, there’s some precious 5th-century sparkle. Mosaics adorn the ''Sacello San Vittore in Ciel d’Oro'', its ‘golden sky’ dome supported by winged monkeys and griffins.
reviewed
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Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa
If you’ve ever contemplated the long desert drive to Marfa, Texas to see the work of American sculptor Dan Flavin, a metro trip to the end of the green line won’t seem like too much of an effort. The suburban Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa, an airy 1930s church, contains his last work, designed shortly before his death in 1996. The arrangement of red, yellow and blue fluorescent lights across the altar, apse and transept is a subtle work - the life and clutter of an everyday church goes on beneath it - but its mix of the formal and the emotional is all the more powerful for its setting.
reviewed