Chiesa di San Bernardino alle Ossa, Milan

San Bernardino alle Ossa is a church whose small ossuary chapel is covered with human skulls and bones. That striking chamber is the reason this place is so widely known. The bone room began in 1210, after the nearby cemetery could no longer accommodate its dead, and a church was added beside it in 1269.

Fire destroyed most of the building in 1712, and Carlo Giuseppe Merlo then designed the present church in Italian Baroque architecture, completed in 1717 and dedicated to Bernardino of Siena. The chapel preserves an extraordinary meeting of devotion and mortality. Its walls are arranged with bones in decorative patterns, while the vault carries a fresco painted in 1695 by Sebastiano Ricci, showing souls rising among angels.

Look at the niches, cornice, pillars, and doors: bone is used as ornament across the chamber, not merely stored away. The remains came from hospital patients, religious officials, prisoners, aristocratic families, and canons; they are not the relics of supposed martyrs from the age of Saint Ambrose. In 1738, King John V of Portugal was so impressed that he commissioned a close copy near Évora, now known as the Capela dos Ossos.