From the street, San Maurizio gives nothing away: a sober Renaissance front on a busy Milanese avenue. Inside, the visitor enters a space entirely covered with painting — walls, vaults, pilasters, every surface frescoed in the sixteenth century by Bernardino Luini, his sons and their circle, which has earned the church its nickname of the Sistine Chapel of Milan. A partition wall divides the building in two: the public hall on one side, and behind it the choir reserved for the cloistered nuns of the Monastero Maggiore, the city's most important female convent, who followed the liturgy through a grille. The paintings tell saints' lives and display the portraits of the noble families who paid for them. Next door, the remains of Roman Milan survive in the walls of the former monastery. Filmed in 4K, the programme documents the decoration panel by panel and restores the enclosed world it was made for.
